Image by KATEIMI

After a period of finding computers and the web terminally dull (a strange state of mind which some would label “sanity”), I’ve been enjoying tinkering with WordPress. Specifically, I discovered a great plugin: Rob Miller’s Now Reading. It’s basically what I had in mind to write when I started writing plugins. You enter an ISBN, the plugin grabs book data and an image from Amazon, and logs it in the database. You can use it just to keep a “currently reading” bit in your sidebar, or to build a full-scale online library—with little reviews and ratings. Which is what I’ve done.

Of course the books I’ve entered in that I’ve already read (1) are not already reviewed in the Reviews section (I think for now I’ll keep my lengthy reviews in here), and (2) are particular faves. I’ll try to keep track of remotely interesting stuff I read from now on in the Library, and hopefully find time to give each one a mini-review as well as a rating.

Oh, if any take your fancy, and you happen to be buying them through Amazon anyway, do follow the “Buy from Amazon” link on the book page in the Library. I’ll get a tiny pittance from the sale. And of course, always buy independently published books direct where possible…

It’s lazy blogging to just throw a quote out. But this is too long for my random quotes in the sidebar, and really, it deserves a post. This is from James Hillman’s Inter Views (p. 191):

You can call this healing, you can call it transformation—there are all sorts of names. But let’s stay with the word “love” because it is so amazing to realize that love is working toward clarification, becoming clarified like a broth, like a butter, because what happens is transparency. And when we try to “clear things up,” go over the past to see it better, or put ourselves through confessions—all that is part of love becoming clarified. We are working at transparency. Impossible dark spots of the interior person get lit up, the shadow, the ugliest man, all the shames and embarrassments regarding the concealed personal tied-up self—well, there they are. “Good morning! How are you! Nice to see you!” They’re aren’t gone away or healed or integrated. [...] There they are, but they have become transparent, for a moment at least, like rubies and emeralds. The leopard can’t change his spots, but the spots can be gems. I am trying to say that your shadow is your virtue, and that is what love is mostly about. And that’s what remains—if anything has to remain—after a person’s dead. His faults, his unbearable qualities, or hers, become clarified, and you remember them as virtues. They stand out sharp and clear, like essences. It’s amazing how the very thing you couldn’t bear in your mother or father, in your wife or husband—they die, and then the rubies show right in the shadow…

A year and a half ago, shortly after moving to Bristol, I wrote something about the exaggeration of fear in fighting terrorism. The day after, there was a “terror raid” in London that, besides being oddly prompt in relation to my post on the previous day, also made me double-take when I saw the location of the raid. I wrote:

I’m slightly concerned that the bomb-makers seem to be following me. I arrived in the UK last year in the middle of the 7/7 bombings, and discovered that some of the bombs may have been manufactured near my old home in the Hyde Park area of Leeds. Now it turns out one of the properties raided last night was very close to my last home, on Forest Road in Walthamstow. Anti-terror squad take note: next time I move, keep a close eye on the Clifton area of Bristol.

Well, it would have been highly peculiar to find bomb factories in Clifton, a bastion of wealthy Englishness. Still, Westbury-on-Trym, the home of the recently arrested 19 year-old “charged with terrorist offences relating to explosive substances”, is a mere three miles away.

I don’t think this has half as much of the “isn’t that weird” synchronistic frisson as I thought it might. I’m kind of getting used to it…

Dreamflesh Journal cover artist Amodali is building momentum with her visionary music. She’ll be showcasing tracks from her forthcoming release Incarnadine on the 11th & 12th of May in Leipzig in Germany as part of the WGT Festival. On the 11th she’s the headline act at The Pagan Village; the 12th sees here sharing the bill at the Kuppelhalle with Psychic TV, Voxus Imp and Barditus.

Checking in on Genesis P-Orridge’s site, I came across this recent interview with him—worth checking out as an in-depth intro if you’re not familiar with him, or a reminder of his fascinating career.

It happened back in February, but I’ve only just heard: Christopher Hyatt, occultist and psychotherapist, author of numerous books on magic and brain/body change, and prolific publisher, has died.

I always found New Falcon’s output a slightly mixed bag, but among its catalogue there were many utterly essential works by Robert Anton Wilson, Phil Hine’s definitive chaos magic manuals, and a long list of other gems from modern Western occultism. Hyatt’s own Undoing Yourself helped give me some of the most revelatory months of my life.

More generally, his great contribution was his energetic appetite for synthesizing the therapeutic work of people like Wilhelm Reich (which he learned from Golden Dawn luminary Israel Regardie) with the full spectrum of psychedelia and sorcery that Western culture generated in the latter part of the 20th century. Without being too arsey about it (he inherited a good line in healthy cynicism from Nietzsche and others), he seemed to me to be re-synthesizing the divergent threads that sprang from the archaic craft of shamanism.

The occult and healing, because of their common ancestry, have always been connected, but modern esotericism often forgot the fact. Things have changed a lot in this regard over the past couple of decades or so; in part, this is thanks to Hyatt’s single-minded will to have more fun and pleasure by any means necessary—and to help others do likewise.

I’ve just created a Google Calendar to keep track of “cultural weirdness and stimulating events”.

If you’re a Google user, search Public Calendars for “Liminal Dream Attractor” and you’ll be able to subscribe to it. If not, you can find it (along with other useful ways of accessing it like RSS) here on the site.

It’ll be maintained by myself, Mark Pilkington and Stephen Grasso; hopefully we’ll find a good balance of varied events without it getting too cluttered and bewildering. As we’re all based in London, UK, there’ll be a certain geographical bias there, but events from all over the world will be considered. Any suggestions, let me know (bearing in mind there’s no guarantee of inclusion!).

I’ve finally finished my post-Basel labours, reporting back from the fantastically busy and eclectic World Psychedelic Forum 2008. Here’s what I’ve got for you:

• My review of the conference.
• A transcript and an MP3 (65MB) of Dale Pendell’s foyer discussion group, plus a review of his new book on Norman O. Brown that I picked up there.
• A bunch of photos.

Sadly, tech gremlins scuppered most of my recordings from the event, including the fascinating interview that Mark Pilkington and I did with Jeremy Narby. Damn!

Many thanks to the organisers for an excellent gathering of minds and bodies.

• 1 January—The works of James Joyce will enter the public domain.
• 6 February—If she is still on the throne, Elizabeth II will celebrate her Diamond Jubilee. A series of festivities across the United Kingdom and Commonwealth of Nations will likely run throughout the year.
• 17 April—The United States will cede control of the military of the Republic of Korea after 50 years of control.
• 6 June—Second and last solar transit of the planet Venus of this century; the next pair is predicted to occur in 2117 and 2125.
• 27 July—Opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics begins in London at 7:30 pm UTC, 8:30pm BST.
• 19 October—at 01:36 UTC, the Earth will be home to 7 billion people, according to the US Census Bureau.
• 13 November—Total solar eclipse (visible in northern Australia and the South Pacific).
• 31 December—Expiration of the Kyoto Protocol.

Unknown dates

• California’s ban on the production of foie gras is scheduled to take effect.
• Freedom Tower in New York City: Construction is scheduled to be finished by 2012 at the latest.
• NASA predicts that the Sun will reverse its own magnetic poles during 2012 as result of reaching the end of the current 11-year sunspot cycle.
• The Canadian Navy receives the delivery of the first Joint Support Ship.
• Charles Manson will be eligible for his twelfth parole hearing.

From Wikipedia.

I’ve been trying and failing to catch up on the archive of fascinating podcast interviews over at C-Realm. It’s tough when there’s a great new broadcast every week—this week being no exception.

As I ended up stalling halfway through series 3 of Battlestar Galactica, I skipped over Amy Kind’s discussion of Cylon identity when I heard her spoiler warning—straight to Erik Davis‘ discussion of “the Imaginal”.

This term was coined (or, at least, popularized—if even that is the right word) by the French scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin, in an attempt to distinguish the realm of visionary reality that holds its own between the worlds of pure matter and pure spirit, from the “merely imaginary”.

I’ve become aware of Corbin’s work via James Hillman, but I’ve yet to dive into what I gather are the immense depths of his writings. The Imaginal is a slippery concept, and I suppose getting any kind of grasp on it involves either the arcane, discursive tactics of complex intellectual perspectives, or a form of mirroring it in allusive artistic expressions.

Characteristically, Erik manages to hold his own between these two, conducting an engagingly loquacious trip through the term’s ramifications in philosophy, rooted in psychedelic encounters and his “tactical skepticism”. It’s as thorough and sophisticated a refutation of the fundamentalist materialism of Dawkins et al. as I’ve heard of late, all the more potent for its pointed yet light embrace of doubt and disbelief. An excellent primer in the Mundus Imaginalis that can be imbibed on the way to work. Do check it out.

Another recently posted Davis fix worth checking out is his talk from last year’s Burning Man festival on ‘The Imagination and the Environment’. Vital issues, discussed by Erik & audience with aplomb.

I’m very excited, and damnably lucky, to have been granted a press pass for this year’s World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland (21st to 24th March). I’ll be interviewing a number of the luminaries and “rising researchers” there, and using these interviews as the basis for an in-depth feature for Dreamflesh Journal (as well as posting the full interviews here).

I’m looking forward to seeing for the first time Stanislav Grof, Dennis McKenna and Ralph Metzner. Hopefully I’ll get round to interviewing Jeremy Narby, after nearly doing so a couple of times. And if Christian Rätsch rustles up anything approaching his impression of himself turning into a panther on his first acid trip that he did at Bath in 2004, I’ll be more than content.

Of course, as with all conferences, the real gems will be found hidden away in unexpected encounters between scheduled events, buried deep in late-night conviviality, and crystallized out of nowhere by the cumulative force of the ideas surrounding you.

I know of the people behind the event, the Gaia Media Foundation, from back in the ’90s—they used to stock Towards 2012. It’s great that they’re still going, stronger than ever, and putting together such catalytic gatherings.