Monthly Link Dump: May 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).

Mên-an-Tol
by Caroline Williams at The Dark Mountain Project

Mên-an-Tol is a series of late Neolithic or early Bronze Age standing stones. It stands near the Madron to Morvah road in Cornwall and is regularly visited by walkers who also visit the abandoned tin mine nearby. The central stone has a large hole, perhaps manmade, perhaps not, which is big enough to crawl through. The poet D.M. Thomas referred to it as ‘the wind’s vagina’, but it is known locally as the ‘Crick Stone’. In Cornish Mên-an-Tol means ‘the stone of the hole’.

On Translation and Trust
by Anthony at Time's Flow Stemmed

Translation does not dilute a text: it opens a second door. It makes the language strange again. When I read Clarice Lispector in English, something shifts in me. It is not what she says, exactly, but the sense that the thought itself has not finished forming. I trust that. I trust the translator’s uncertainty.

Marion Adnams, Paul Nash and Unsettling Landscapes – Wyrd Art Forebears and Pathways Through Time: Wyrd Explorations 18
by Stephen Prince at A Year In The Country

From time to time, I discover work that seems like an accidental forebear of wyrd culture, and which was created long before the contemporary upsurge of interest in the uncanny, eerie flipside of rural, folk etc orientated culture. An example of this are some of the paintings by Marion Adnams, who lived and worked in Derby from 1898 until her death in 1995. Her work found recognition during her lifetime but for an extended period she became semi-forgotten, and there was not an exhibition devoted to her work for fifty years, until one took place at Derby Museum and Art Gallery in 2017-2018.

One Hour of Dancing Mon Mothma
by Keenan

The Fight isn't merely fury. The Fight is opposition, and opposition is creating what they don't have. Cultivating quiet. Taking space. Making peace. Relishing in the most importance aspects of our humanity, our love for each other, our creativity manifest. In what ways do you defy expectation? In what ways do you express yourself?

Documents Décoratifs by Alphonse Mucha
by John Coulthart at { feuilleton }

The plates were Alphonse Mucha’s contribution to that small collection of publications intended to assist other designers and craftspeople in their decorative work. Mucha’s drawings break down his style into a series of isolated motifs and design elements: panels, borders, figures, flowers, lettering and other details, together with a few pages of more complete designs.

Unseen – In Search of the Sublime and Spirit of Place
by Rachel Poulton at Caught by the River

The South Downs is a perfect place for drift and daydream. I freefall into the landscape and its deep time. Uncanny auras and silent subterranean tremors guide me. I’m searching for the Unseen, those primordial ghosts and traces of long ago that still exist if you know how to look.

On “NSFW”
by Joe Crawford at Artlung

But it’s a problem that artistic nudity or bodies are still scorned in corporate environments. Additionally it brings to mind parental browsing controls that categorize sites. I’ve worked in a number of workplaces which included filtering technologies to hide some sites. Given how many great tutorials and write-ups of programming things are on personal blogs I’ve run into such filters deciding those links were unsafe.

What the Land Requires of Us
by Mark Nemglan

If complex landscapes and their habitats, formed from diverse families of indwelling plant genii, are eradicated and replaced with tracts of intensively farmed, genetically manipulated zombie plants, then nothing of value to the land-spirits remains. Its human equivalent is the blanket-bombing of a city; all is destroyed save for a handful of refugees, who flee to safety elsewhere.

Democracies are fragile and die not with a bang but slowly, piece by piece, with a whimper. Will the UK follow the US?
by Richard Smith at Richard Smith's non-medical blogs

I write about the disturbing book How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two Harvard professors, on the day that Reform, the right-wing party led by Nigel Farage, has come from nowhere to make startling gains in local elections. Although it seems unlikely that anybody called Nigel could become a dictator and despite the UK having one of the world’s oldest democracies, could Farage undermine British democracy? I’ll reflect on the end, but what is clear is that Donald Trump is shaking American democracy, possibly to destruction.

An email bulletin called SPAM. A Facebook page with no friends. A Twitter account with no followers…
by Sheffield Patrol Group

The internet has monopolised and restricted the idea of the new and reinforced the capitalist consumer-based monoculture rather than undermined it. The positive potential for communication and dissemination of information that the internet promises is subverted by its inflexible nature, which encourages us to live in narrow spaces that entice us away from sympathetic encounters with our fellow creatures.

A Doubleplusgood Evening In The Company Of George Orwell's Biographer.
by Evans is a place on Earth

George Orwell saw a future world that would no longer be run by generals with great armies but one that would bow down to the power of managers and technocrats. That was a scary thought when he died three quarters of a century ago. It's still a scary one now and it seemed like a very apposite note to end the talk on.

Light
by Simone at Minutes to Midnight

Back then, I used to spend some time each day, usually at dusk, sitting in our courtyard looking at the sky and imagining how it would be to see the missiles flying above us, eager to reach their targets. It strikes me now how I used to think about the possibility of nuclear war: terrified and excited at the same time. Like an inevitability that I should at least have some fun out of it.

The Books that Made Me
by Paul Kincaid at Through the dark labyrinth

I came up, very very quickly, with a list of 20 books, which I knew was incomplete. But then I had to stop. This would all too easily get out of hand, I had to restrict myself to 10 books or the whole thing would be too long for me to write or for anybody to read. But that was where things got painful

Meet the Declinists!
by Simon Reynolds at blissblog

Seems to me that with most eras - apart from exceptionally supercharged, forward-thrusting decades like the Sixties - there's usually sufficient evidence someone could draw on to argue either the Declining Times or It's A Golden Age case ( especially if the positive stance is modified with a "if you know where to look").

Ernest Biéler’s Magic Eye
by S. Elizabeth at Unquiet Things

What causes a piece of art to catch your eye? It will come as a surprise to no one that mine gravitates toward certain irresistible elements—jewelry that catches light in impossible ways, flowers rendered with botanical precision yet somehow more alive than their real counterparts, clothing that drapes with such exquisite attention to fabric’s weight and flow that you can almost hear the rustle of silk against skin. Perhaps most compelling to me is that particular quality of melancholy that hovers at the edges of beauty, reminding us of its inherent fragility.

What About The Lazy?
by The Peaceful Revolutionary

‘What About The Lazy?’ This question seems to come up every time you mention any alternatives to Capitalism, as if it is some sort of ‘gotcha’ question that will render anyone on the Left speechless.

Who owns the South Downs? (2025 edition)
by Guy Shrubsole at Who owns England?

Just 29 landowners own over 100,000 acres of the South Downs, stretching 100km along the chalk outcrop, Who Owns England can reveal.

Long London, Magic & the future of Humanity
by smoky man at Alan Moore World

Omar, Francesco & I are really, really excited & honoured to present an exclusive interview with ALAN MOORE about his most recent works and... much more! Thank you Alan for such a gift and... for your words! Grazie mille!

Eventful life
by Chris at uncountable thoughts

Time is the only important asset we have really, and it’s dwindling before our very eyes. When you no longer work, you can allocate time however you choose, and having a diary full of events is an excellent way to maximise return on available time.

Harry Clarke’s illustrated Swinburne
by John Coulthart at { feuilleton }

Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne was Clarke’s last illustrated book, published in 1928, three years before his untimely death. Of all the major Clarke books that appeared during the artist’s lifetime it’s always been the most difficult to find.

Trying to build community is hard when you’re entirely on your own.
by Pete Brown at Exploding Comma

I was just talking with someone the other day about how a friend group that used to be pretty active has largely fallen away. All of us are still around, but we barely even see one another any more, and all of the group chats have gone almost entirely silent.

Policing perception: weird fiction, the Gutenberg Parenthesis and the warped borders of the real
by Philip A. Suggars at myelectriceye

This is the terrain of the weird. Not quite full blown fantasy, but the quiet unease that things might not be quite right. A sense that the ground beneath your trainers might be a little less solid than you previously thought.