give up & make strange new friends in the decaying city of moth hovel
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Moth Hovel pamphlets at Exalted Funeral
I’m delighted to announce that Visit the Weird Decaying City of Moth Hovel and Visit the Wild Decaying Island of Bermoothes are now available in print editions exclusively from Exalted Funeral. (You can still pick the PWYW PDFs up from our itch.io, along with bonus digital hex art.) Visit the Weird Decaying City of Moth…
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Thoughts on Kissinger
I’ve now spent many years now thinking about Kissinger, as an intellectual historian and a political theorist, so here are some thoughts, if you are interested: The hatred for Kissinger stems from a deep discomfort with the tragic realities of politics. As Helmuth Plessner notes, “The less politics is respected, the worse it becomes.” Elements…
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Enrico Marini: Noir Burlesque (2023)
Enrico Marini’s Noir Burlesque succeeds at its task of staging a gritty, lush noir in the classic hardboiled style. The plot is a familiar nightmare – but isn’t this how a noir tale is supposed to be? Noir doesn’t exactly operate on the principle of novelty, although many of its most innovative entries certainly impress…
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Robert Irwin: on crime and tortoises
Medieval treatises on crime recognized several categories of thief. One group of housebreakers, the burrowers, simply dug their way through the mud-dried bricks in order to force an entry into the house they wanted to burgle. Other thieves employed hooked poles and grappling irons to fish things out of windows. Others used to make use…
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Arthur C. Clarke: The Deep Range (1957)
Typically for Clarke, a complex, humane, and wistful novel. Seasoned spaceman Walter Franklin suffers from extreme astrophobia after a space walk gone awry. He’s reassigned to the Bureau of Whales, which manages the world’s oceans (and ranches the world’s whales) in order to feed humankind. The adjustment and reintegration period is somewhat difficult. During his…
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Ballard: “Notes From Nowhere” (1966)
1. Science fiction, above all a prospective form of fiction, concerned with the immediate present in terms of the future rather than the past, requires narrative techniques that reflect its subject matter. To date almost all its writers, including myself, fall to the ground because they fail to realise that the principal narrative technique of…
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Ballard: “Time, Memory and Inner Space” (1963)
How far do the landscapes of one’s childhood, as much as its emotional experiences, provide an inescapable background to all one’s imaginative writing? Certainly my own earliest memories are of Shanghai during the annual long summer of floods, when the streets of the city were two or three feet deep in a brown silt-laden water,…
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Top ten reads: 2023
1. Christa Davis Acampora’s Contesting Nietzsche (2022): Single best piece of recent Nietzsche scholarship. Provides a selective, substantial overview of the importance of agonism for Nietzsche, which often gets downplayed, ignored, or subsumed into a general logic of argumentation. Also, engages seriously and significantly with the early Nietzsche, a topic of increasing personal and scholarly…
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Tsutomu Nihei: Blame! (1)
Tsutomu Nihei. Blame! Master Edition 3. 2017. 314-315.
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![Umberto Eco: “Images for Aliens” (1995 [1993])](https://mothhovel.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/cover.png?w=1024)
Umberto Eco: “Images for Aliens” (1995 [1993])
Perhaps the most discomforting document for the future of the language of images is the report drawn up in 1984 by Thomas A. Sebeok (Sebeok 1984). He had been commissioned by the Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation and by a group of other institutions to elaborate answers to a question posed by the US Nuclear…
NIGHT IS ALSO A SUN – BATAILLE
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