Hot off the presses, the much-anticipated fourth installment of Strange Attractor Journal. Nestled amongst the illustrious contents is an essay by yours truly, ‘Sketches of the Goat-God in Albion’, documenting and ruminating upon the odd manifestations of Pan in my life.

Other highlights include an exploration of voodoo music history by Dreamflesh contributor Stephen Grasso, Peacock angel meditations from Erik Davis, other contributions from Paul Devereux, Alan Moore, Mike Jay, Ken Hollings, Robert Wallis, and David Luke, and splendid artwork from Arik Roper and Joel Biroco.

Essential stuff! Check it out.

So of course I have a background rosy feeling about the guy. But, while I found his recent books Life Inc. and Program or Be Programmed to be well-written, sound advice, none of it comes close to this closing keynote talk he gave at a social media conference. He says:

I got really tired of listening to brand managers talk about their “Twitter strategies,” and by the time my closing keynote came around, it felt like I had watched the corporatization the net recapitulated over the course of the afternoon.

Please watch this if you’ve not come across Douglas’ recent ideas.

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…

Dreamflesh Journal contributor Stephen Grasso is now blogging under the banner ‘Clean living in difficult circumstances‘. Stephen sums it up thusly:

It will predominantly feature writing about Voodoo, magic, music, obscure records, psychogeography, and whatever else I get up to and feel like writing about.

It’s essentially a way for me to get regular new material out while I work on finishing my book, so I don’t feel quite so much like one of those guys who secretly makes a throne for the Archangel Metatron out of lightbulbs and toilet rolls in his garage, that nobody else ever gets to see or hear about.

The book in question is, needless to say, much anticipated. For now, the blog serves up Stephen’s refreshingly relevant occultism, subversive antics in the City, and obscure Voodoo vinyl, with rum & cigars aplenty.

Last year me and a few others quietly put together an online discussion community whose aim was (in the words of the official blurb) “to promote a visible and intelligent discourse around the theory and practice of magic, spirituality and experiential religion”. We wanted a high signal-to-noise ratio, writing that could work as reasonable quality for readers as well as participants, and a respectful, good-natured, slowly-growing membership. Thus, Liminal Nation.

I, true to my preference for either a book or a pub to online discussion, have remained a shadowy background figure. However, by all accounts it’s gently thriving, and Dreamflesh readers who feel they might want to join in are encouraged to head over and apply.

Yeah, the application process was one of the moves to keep the whole thing troll- and bore-free. Sometimes not a popular idea for people who advocate a very simple “openness” on the net (are there many of those left in these days of 85% spam?), not to mention trolls and bores. To me it’s a no-brainer for the kind of site we’re looking to nurture. Freedom on the net includes the freedom to create your own space with its own rules, as long as they don’t infringe on others.

Anyway, you can read the discussions for yourself, read more about the site’s ethos, and apply if it looks like your cup of tea.

Publication of Volume 2 got pushed forward by Archaeologies of Consciousness, and now was the time I’d slated to get things moving again. As it stands, the economy’s slowing (if not collapsing completely, disguised by short-term measures and wishful thinking). And while I’ve a number of exciting things ready for the next one, being non-profit and non-paying, it’s always a case of chasing and tracking down contributions rather than getting any great unsolicited material. I could make things work with some extra effort, but actually I find myself drawn ever deeper into some research and writing that I want to devote more time to.

Note that this is a suspension rather than a cancellation. I’ve no idea how long this might last, but I do want to leave the door ajar. That said, I’d rather formally put a hold on things than let the journal drift further into an undignified, unannounced hiatus.

For now, both Dreamflesh Vol. 1 and Archaeologies have been slightly reduced in price for direct online sale: both are now £7 (UK) or £9 (Rest of World), including postage and packing.

I’ll be posting more juiciness here on the site as a result: leftover content from Vol. 2, old material from Towards 2012 that I’ve not got round to posting, and eventually the contents of Dreamflesh Vol. 1. Watch this space…

Reading this post about the future of publishing, I found a number of interesting, depressing or exciting perceptions flying around like sparks from the clash between it and my current reading of Peter Ackroyd’s excellent Blake biography.

Seizing the means

Of course, the exciting part of it is the web’s promise to cut out the middle men: large publishers and distributors. The author of the post, Aaron Wall, a search engine optimization expert, calls for artists to become publishers (and for publishers to become artists). I’m way ahead of him on that one, editing and publishing my own stuff since before the web. Granted, it’s never been a commercial proposition, but the principle holds: optimism for the future has to include artists and writers seizing the means of production, and technology facilitating their expressions rather than commerce hampering them.

William Blake was way ahead, too, printing (with his tireless wife Catherine) many of his creations, famously pioneering a new print process known as relief etching. He used this technique to print his “illuminated books”, words and images combined on one metal plate.

Blake’s control over the technical means of his creativity was more than just a convenience. He understood the spiritual roots of McLuhan’s “medium is the message” centuries before media studies.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Here, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he rallies the process of relief etching, where acids burn away unprotected parts of the copper printing plate, to stand as a metaphor for the lifting of the veils from our degraded sensual perceptions. But this is almost beyond the realm of metaphor, as his means of conveying his idea is itself symbolic of the idea.

What kind of world does our new media—untouchable, frictionless, both pervasive and ephemeral, empowering and bewildering—convey? Do we want to live there?

Information snacks

The post embeds a brief interview with Cory Doctorow on how to blog effectively, and his advice boils down to: write like a wire service writer. Write like your audience could put your words down after a few seconds, because they probably will. At least, the people that “count” will:

Most people with significant social and/or economic influence have (an equivalent of) attention deficit disorder, caused by an interruption-driven life cluttered with too much content and too little time. People may want to consume relevant bits [...] Little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us.

I’m more interested than most in nurturing our besieged attention spans; part of my reason for reviving my relationship with print publishing is to encourage more breaks with the flooding rush of information flow, more oxbow lakes of reflective reading, or at least some meanders.

But wasn’t Blake one of the masters of “little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us”? So much so that I’ve no need to throw any at you—most people reading this will have at least a few almost clichéd pithy quotes from his poetry and writing to hand. Scanning a compilation of Blake quotes, it’s astonishing how many they are, how brief they are, and how potent their kick of perceptual reconfiguring is.

Many great thinkers are (or can be) aphoristic thinkers: Nietzsche, Einstein, Lao Tsu, Voltaire, Wittgenstein… Need one mention Jesus? Or Woody Allen?

The closely sustained argument of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death left him in a place where the revelatory infernal corrosives started breaking his language down into exaggerated, non-linear aphorisms, a kind of erudite prose poetry. He quotes McLuhan quoting Francis Bacon:

Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest.

Brown goes on to proclaim:

Systematic form attempts to evade the necessity of death in the life of the mind as of the body; it has immortal longings in it, and so it remains dead. [...] The rigor is rigor mortis; systems are wooden crosses, Procrustean beds on which the living mind is pinned. Aphorism is the form of death and resurrection: “the form of eternity”.

All of which is a far cry from the kind of disposable blandness that usually results from “best practices” in blog writing! Still, might Blake have found some affinity with the web, with its eagerness for snappy one-liners and aptitude for textual and visual combinations?

What’s missing here is, firstly, the state of the reader, and secondly, the value of thorough reading, even (or especially) of aphoristic writers. Aphorisms, as a kind of pocket poetry of ideas, can compact very sophisticated insights into tiny seeds of expression. For that insight to properly unfold, however, the ground must be receptive—as Jesus taught in his Parable of the Sower. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” (Luke 8:8) Which of us, hurried into a permanently anxious low-level emergency state, frazzled with caffeine, eager to click the next link or check our inboxes, has ears to hear much at all?

It’s true that the greatness of someone like Nietzsche is that he wasn’t a system-builder. And yet, there are subtly (or not-so-subtly) dangerous misinterpretations lying in wait to prey on anyone who hasn’t surveyed the full scope of his thought. James Hillman’s work is similar. There are core ideas and tendencies, but the experimental nature of this thought leaves an particular arc that unfolds through his career. Apprehending it all doesn’t leave you with a totalized “system”, but it naturally creates a much fuller understanding of his work. My good friend Jim assures me that Gregory Bateson’s eclectic oeuvre is similarly rewarded by a comprehensive reading. Connections between apparently disparate ideas reveal themselves; and one starts seeing that the connections are the point of his worldview.

But who has the time to read all of Nietzsche, Hillman or Bateson? The dark Satanic offices demand their vast share of your life, and our hyperconnected society lets their demands press ever harder.

Art, commerce, democracy

Ackroyd, early on in Blake, contrasts the London prophet with the Romantic poets he’s normally loosely lumped with. He makes much of the fact that, despite “the dark Satanic mills”, Blake didn’t share the Romantics’ aversion to commerce, making his way (just) throughout his life as an engraver.

It’s true that Blake’s life as an artisan, a tradesman, coloured him in ways that differentiate him from, say, Wordsworth and Coleridge. But what colour?

When he returned to London in 1804, after three generally unsuccessful years near the Sussex coast, Blake “was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters.” (Quoted in Ackroyd, p. 271) Ackroyd comments:

He is very specific about the period of darkness he has had to undergo, with a duration of twenty years up to this year of 1804. 1784 was the year in which his father died and in which he set up the print-selling business with James Parker in Broad Street. It was the beginning, then, of his life as a tradesman, conducted perhaps in emulation of his dead father.

He saw these two decades, wherein his youthful creativity was constantly restricted by commercial concerns, as time spent “as a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils”.

In the interview with Aaron Wall where I found his post on publishing, Wall is asked what he thinks the net will look like 100 or 200 years from now.

I think the distinction between the web and the real world will be hard to draw, or perhaps non-existent. Communication technologies will keep evolving and information will available readily in whatever format you like, but with well blended ads. It will become nearly impossible to see the difference between ads and content.

This tendency towards intensifying the blend between commerce and art, advertising and communication, is it creating a hybrid culture that transcends both, some utopian marriage? Or is it the bars of the Black Iron Prison becoming invisible, seamless?

Wall states the obvious dynamic of commercial survival:

If I target an idea to a market and people tell me it is garbage then so much for that idea. If early feedback looks promising then it is time to dig deeper, do more research, read more, and write more. Invest where your interests align with the interest of others.

The web promises a broad democratization of the supply-demand axis in publishing. But—oodles of pointless and shit websites notwithstanding—I thought the point of cutting out the middlemen was to enable more diversity?* Of course Wall’s goal is to help people be more commercially successful, so I can’t criticize his good advice. It’s just indicative of the growing control that “the consumer” has over their media world. And while I generally champion this control, I can’t help but see its shadow: the death of revelation.

Audiences can’t be ignored. But they should never be obeyed (just as publishers or artists should never be obeyed by their audiences). The artist’s responsibility (which, as Wall noted, is destined to overlap with that of the publisher) is to a certain extent, as David Cronenberg noted, to be irresponsible. Not wilfully or gratuitously; but to challenge, to provoke, to proffer unpalatable truths. To surprise, to lift the veils. If everyone gets exactly what they want, much of value to life will remain unseen, held at bay.

The web may yet be a tool of conviviality, a means to negotiate between the oppressions of both fascism and democracy. Things don’t look too promising. But I am—I hope—still open to surprises and revelations.

I’ll just end by noting one of the final questions in the interview with Aaron Wall:

How much offline reading do you do?

Much less than I would like…

* I realize that for the most part, the move from top-down to bottom-up dictation of media content is a move towards more diversity. I don’t oppose this. The “diversity” I’m talking about (as becomes clear) is diversions from what people immediately want, in a surface, ego, “gimme this” kind of way.