Naturally I’ll post updates here as publication approaches (early 2012 a good estimate), but I’ve also kicked off a website for the project with a sign-up for a special mailing list dedicated to the book. The book’s title isn’t confirmed, but the site is named with rough aptness ‘Polar Cosmology‘.

Apologies for the late heads-up, but yesterday I posted my first contribution to Dorian Cope’s brilliant On This Deity blog.

November 16th saw the birth of Terence McKenna, the death of Alan Watts, and—just last year—the death of Pablo Amaringo. As if to confirm the wyrdness of this psychedelic confluence of anniversaries, the date also happens to be when LSD-25 was first synthesized. So, this was the topic of my November 16th post.

Look no further. Bid for a custom-made Pat Robertson voodoo doll:

(Thanks to Gypsy Lantern for this. Check out his post on Haiti for the background to Robertson’s lurid nonsense, as well as thoughtful reflections on the role of Haiti’s religious traditions in the reporting of the earthquake, and a round-up of other good places to send donations.)

At first it was a part of a talk given early this year at Metageum in London. Then I thought I’d develop it into an essay. Then it seemed long enough to print as a nice pamphlet. It’s ended up being a slim book.

It’s my effort to analyze and contribute to the recent debates about the “Noble Savage”. Are pre-civilized cultures more peaceful than we are? Do they live in greater harmony with the environment? Of late, people such as Steven Pinker, Lawrence Keeley and Steven LeBlanc, who aren’t overt bigots—indeed, who generally seem to be fine, well-meaning liberal folks—have been answering these questions with a resounding “no”. In War & the Noble Savage I’ve surveyed this recent literature, and tried to dig beneath the polarized surface of the debate using some less popularized anthropological and historical scholarship.

It went to the printers just today, and should be ready to send out by the end of next week. I’m taking pre-orders now if anyone wants to dive in. (Please note that I’ve also revamped my PayPal integration, and I’ve included options to buy different Dreamflesh publications together and save money on postage.)

October Gallery talk

Coinciding with the release of the book, I’m pleased to have been invited to speak in the October Gallery‘s ‘Ecology, Cosmos & Consciousness’ lecture series on Tuesday 27th October. For more details and booking information see the October Gallery website. I’ll be presenting the book’s main ideas there, and leaving plenty of time for discussion—please bring your questions and ideas along! Copies of the book will of course be on sale, at a specially reduced price.

Review copies

If anyone’s interested in reviewing this, please get in touch.

Related material

At the bottom of the book’s page you’ll find a compilation of related material—my book reviews and blog posts covering similar area, plus a collection of links to the websites, articles, and videos I drew on in my research.

Feedback

If anyone who reads the book wants to respond to anything in it or ask questions, please use the comments here…

Modern city dwellers are used to the constant presence, here and there, of gaps in the architecture as old buildings are torn down and new ones are built. Still, when the building in question harbours potent (if hoary) memories of formative experiences, turning the corner to see air, nothing, in its place is an unusual ontological shock.

I got that the other day when I walked from Holborn to Oxford Street and, just passing Centre Point near Tottenham Court Road, stopped sharply in astonishment to see that the London Astoria—and the whole block of buildings it was part of, including the Dionysus chip shop I was heading for—was gone. At first it seemed to just register as something taken-for-granted and familiar suddenly vanished, a simple upsetting of the habitual norm. Then, as I stood looking incredulously at the empty space that filled what was once a living place, all those old gigs started bubbling up…

After I passed my driving test, I would fill my red Mini with friends and we’d pile down the A1 to London to see bands.

Bad Brains, 29/9/89

The first was Bad Brains, the legendary Washington DC hardcore punk rastas. They were past their heyday of course, but it was stupidly exciting. We bunked off school on the Friday afternoon and hit London rush hour around 5.30pm. This was about a week after I’d passed my driving test, and I’d never driven in a city before. Ha! That rush very much set me up for the gig. Before the band even came on, a knife fight rolled past us like one of those cartoon clouds of dust with arms and legs sticking out. The band were stunning, and the mosh pit was the entire venue (or so it seemed). They did a curt set, and when they refused to come on for an encore, the audience started tearing the stage apart. YouTube has a snippet of them doing Re-Ignition at the gig.

Red Hot Chili Peppers, 11/2/90

I’d missed the tour of the Chili Peppers album that got me into them, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, so I sadly missed guitarist Hillel Slovak, who died soon after. But his eventual replacement for the Mother’s Milk tour was a fresh-faced 19 year old called John Frusciante. It’s odd looking back now they’re a stadium band and he’s (rightly) regarded as one of the best guitarists in the world (I wholeheartedly recommend his recent solo stuff). I remember him gyrating with insane grace all the way through Nevermind, his feet rooted to the spot and his hips tracing a blur of a circle and his guitar spinning us all around.

Jane’s Addiction, 5/10/90

Another band I’d missed before, on the Nothing’s Shocking tour. By all accounts Perry Farrell was less smack-addled and the band tensions were creatively frictious then, whereas this tour saw some shambolic playing and mundane chaos creeping in. Still, it was a frenzied spectacle, with a fantastically diverse, druggy and vibrant crowd. I think it was only when I caught them at Brixton Academy in 1991 that they had their full Ritual de lo Habitual stage set, with Farrell’s sculpture of him in bed with his two ladies, adorned with Santerian paraphernalia. But the epic centrepieces of this album, Three Days and Then She Did, conjured up enough exotic and sensual riots of energy on their own at the Astoria that night.

I’ve only been to the Astoria sporadically in the years since these early gigs, but they were more than enough. I’m sure I’ll think of them every time I walk past that space, even as it transforms into a Crossrail station…

Top of my current list of things that warrant me doing a Moses on the Red Sea of busyness bearing down on me, to bring my dear readers’ attention to it, is Dorian Cope’s new blog, On This Deity: Commemorating Culture Heroes & Excavating World Events.

Billing it as “an alternative ‘On This Day’”, for a good few weeks now Dorian’s been posting every few days on some birth, death, or other significant event that took place on that date. The focus is on visionaries and radicals from everywhere on that riotous spectrum: from the death of Maud Gonne (muse to W.B. Yeats and bold revolutionary in her own right) to the release of ‘God Save The Queen’; from Oscar Wilde’s release from Reading Gaol to the straw that broke the back of the camel in the way of me writing this, a remembrance of Helen Keller’s death, and a reminder of her radical political views.

Dorian and her indefatigable husband Julian have been staunch and forthright supporters of my writing and publishing since we met in 1996. What makes this much more than an obligatory reciprocation is the pleasure of seeing Dorian’s razor-sharp perceptions and infectious energy, which have inspired me endlessly in conversations over the years, transfer so well to writing. Her posts popping up several times a week in my feed aggregator have the habit of quickly creating a bubble of attentiveness, within which she paints a vivid picture of a moment in radical history. It’s a steady stream of historical nourishment—feast away!

From indefatigable comedian and activist Mark Thomas, an impassioned rant against “neo-liberal capitalism” given at the Put People First G20 rally in Hyde Park, London, 28/3/09:

And a more in-depth, though equally passionate call for the decentralization of currency from media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, given at the Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, 2/4/09:

It’s a while since I published my essay and booklet on Verbeia, the Romano-Celtic goddess from Ilkley. I did a revised edition of the booklet in 2000 or so, to include new information; but now that more information has come to my attention, I decided to try and create an easily referenced consolidation of Verbeia research that I can keep up-to-date.

I’ve added some bits to the Wikipedia page, but I suspect some of the speculation there (pretty tame by my standards) may, strictly speaking, have overstepped the boundaries of Wikipedia’s style guidelines.

Well, I’d recently heard of one of Google’s latest ventures, knol. “A unit of knowledge” that say—which seems a little forced to me. It’s still in beta, but it’s got some interesting differences from the Wiki. There’s the usual Google attention to usability and neat detail. You create your own pages on anything. You can collaborate with others if you want, but that’s on a strictly voluntary basis. Obviously it has different strengths and weaknesses to the Wiki, but it seemed ideal as a place to collate my Verbeia research.

So, here’s my Verbeia knol.

It’s set to “moderated collaboration”, so anyone logged in can suggest additions or corrections that I then vet.

A small lesson from publicizing this came from posting a link on the Modern Antiquarian’s Swastika Stone page. I thought I’d found some new info about Verbeia and the Swastika Stone’s relationship. Just after I posted my new link, I noticed the venerable Kozmik Ken had posted the same info four years ago. Ah well, I’m only just getting back into this research lark…