Monthly Link Dump: November 2024

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 Joe Crawford at ArtLung - Dune and Colonialism:

I notice that Al has put up his post about Dune from 2021. It’s called Diving into Dune and in it he talks about his enjoyment of reading the books in advance of the then new film.

From the Sheffield Patrol Group - Crookes Valley Park, 27 January 2024:

I am reminded that one’s conception of space changes as we grow older, in line with the truism that the places we encounter when we are young seem far bigger than they do if we revisit them when we are older, after we have attained the age of reason, as the saying goes, although that state or age rarely seems to be rational when it is examined.

From Jim Nielsen at Jim Nielsen’s Blog - We’re All Content Creators for Machines:

But it’s even more than just consumption. Previously, plagiarizing the speech of others on social platforms required effort on your part to obfuscate individual voice as well as sources. But now you can pass the speech of others through an LLM and let the machine do all that work for you!

From Richard Smith at Richard Smith’s non-medical blogs - Translate and become a living ghost of another person:

Without translators many of the books that I have loved would have been unavailable to me; and even those who speak ten languages need translators because they still can’t read most languages. Translators have until recently been regarded as literary servants, often hardly mentioned, but now their value is being recognised. What I hadn’t grasped until I read about Paul Auster’s thoughts about translating in Irene Vallejo’s Papyrus (which I couldn’t have read if Charlotte Whittle hadn’t translated it for me) is just what a strange and magical act it is to translate

From Emma Heard at Weird Wiltshire - Avebury: Squaring the Circle (A Very Personal View):

But when we’re talking about Avebury in an ancient sense – and as our H&M walkers are discovering! – it’s vital to recognise that it’s an awful lot more than ‘just’ a prehistoric stone circle (albeit the world’s biggest…) with a huge henge wrapped round it. We’re talking about a wide, complex landscape stretching in every direction and shaped during an absolutely pivotal phase in British history: the Neolithic period (or New Stone Age), which ran from 4000 to 2500 BC, and the very early Bronze (i.e. ‘Copper’) Age covering the following few centuries.

From Morag at The Loiterers Resistance Movement - November 2024 a Withy Walls Wander:

Novembers derive has a guest facilitating our curious, convivial and communal travels. Thanks to Lydia for hosting a “Withy Walls Wander.” I don’t know quite what we will discover but she has shared some of the themes we will be exploring… “the writing on the wall; murals and graffiti; flyposting and stickers versus paid advertising; small details and the bigger picture; community activism or gentrification; moss, lichen and weeds; intended interventions and accidental juxtapositions.” Many of these resonate across time and place and I have no doubt this will be a loiter to treasure.

From Anne-Lawrence Mathers at Ancient Origins - The Supernatural Beliefs of Medieval People—From Elves and Fairies to Abductions and the Undead:

Christian theologians accepted the existence of the supernatural, categorising such beings broadly as “fallen angels” who viewed humanity as a battleground in their ongoing conflict with God. Their enormous power meant they could even appear as deities, including the pagan gods and goddesses – they were seen to take on a monstrous appearance mainly when claiming the souls of the damned or when being defeated by a Christian leader.

From The Peaceful Revolutionary - Utopian Dreams & Realities:

Yesterday I came upon a forward thinking, positive future scenario for the world, titled ‘Future For All - A Vision For 2048’, and started reading it straight away. It is a one hundred page book detailing the possible practical changes that would make the world much better, and eliminate most its major problems. It’s an encouraging and accessible book to read, with good colourful illustrations that help put its message into perspective.

From the Folk Horror Revival & Urban Wyrd Project - Albion’s Eco-Eerie: TV & Movies of the Haunted Generation by Phil Smith. Book Review:

In Albion’s Eco-Eerie, author and professor, Phil Smith seeks an alternative reading of TV and Movies of the Haunted Generations suggesting looking at the media in terms of ‘unhuman characters, the materials and the edgeland spaces’. He suggests the term ‘hobgoblinology’ as a name for his contemplation of the subject matter, but I question whether that is necessary as the ‘Eco-eerie’ term he uses in the book title does a much better job of specifically conveying the centre of attention.

From Stephen Prince at A Year in the Country - The Shock of the Future and Explorations of New Electronic Worlds:

The Shock of the Future, aka Le Choc Du Futur, is a 2009 French language film set in 1978 which is centred around the birth of electro-pop and a female electronic musician called Ana, who creates related music. It was written, directed and part scored by Marc Collin, who is best known as the co-founder of the band Nouvelle Vague, which released covers of new wave, punk, etc songs in a bossa nova style (think Astrud Gilberto singing a breezy version of a Joy Division in the 1960s and you’re not a million miles off).

From Sheryl M. Medlicott at Just Utopias - My new publication on The Word for World is Forest by Ursula Le Guin:

Following the The Word for World is Forest symposium, I was invited to turn my presentation into a full length article for The Acorn journal. I’m pleased to say this is now available online.

From Mandy Brown at A Working Library - Practicing New Worlds:

Andrea Ritchie draws from Black feminist abolitionist politics, emergent strategies, and speculative fiction to light up a path for surviving racial capitalism, growing fascism, and the climate crisis. Critically, she shows how that path is nonlinear, adaptive and iterative, and rooted in cooperation and collective sustainability.

From Bobby Seal at Psychogeographic Review - Two Arrow Falls (from Chester City Walls) by Giants of Discovery:

The Wirral and Chester’s city walls are two of my favourite places for walking, looking and contemplating, so this new album by Giants of Discovery was one I definitely needed to hear. The Wirral is very much its own place: a finger of land squeezed between Wales and Merseyside, close to both but part of neither. With its ancient villages, woods and marshes it is a haunted land soaked in memory, its Norse past betrayed in many of the local place names.

From Stephen Prince at A Year in the Country - The White Reinder – A Folk Horror Precursor Under a Leaden Sky:

The White Reindeer (1952) was the first film made by Finnish cinematographer Erik Blomberg. It is set amongst the bleakly beautiful snowbound landscape of Finnish Lapland and tells the story of a newly married young woman called Pirita who becomes lonely, frustrated and desperate for affection due to her husband often being away herding reindeer, which leads her to seek out a shaman who gives her a potion which will make her desirable to all men.

From Tim Footman at Cultural Snow - About semantic bleaching:

I got into a polite exchange of views a couple of days back over an otherwise unexceptional story about, of all things, expensive mince pies. Or, more specifically, over the language used by the good citizens of Orford, in Suffolk, where the Pump Street Bakery makes delicacies that are supposedly the priciest mince pies going. When one of the locals described them as “bespoke”, I was confused, because there had been nothing in the article to tell us this was the case. In fact, if they really were bespoke, or what I’d define as bespoke, created to the precise specifications of each customer, then the price (£25 for six) wouldn’t seem so exorbitant.

From John Lampard at disassociated - Substack, no alternative to independent websites and blogs:

But I’d already been hearing Substack appeared to permit the proliferation of misinformation, conspiracy theorists, and far-right ideologies, and was taking no action against the publishers of such content. I have no interest whatsoever in reading that sort of material, but it makes me wonder. Should content some people find objectionable actually be deleted by the administrators of a publishing platform like Substack? And then: how do we define what is acceptable, and what’s not?