Dreamflesh

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.

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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”.

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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).

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Photo by Mark Pilkington

So, the belated launch of Archaeologies of Consciousness at Treadwell’s Books last Friday went swimmingly.

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I’m no Blake scholar. And I know precious little about neo-Platonism and alchemy, relatively speaking, when you consider how steeped in these traditions many of the writers and thinkers who have influenced me are. So I don’t feel qualified to properly review this excellent little book by Kathleen Raine, which I randomly picked up in a second-hand shop in Bristol last year. However, it deserves a mention.

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I’m not as engaged with reading WorldChanging.com as I used to be. Over the past couple of years it’s transitioned to have a much higher number of detailed solutions-focused posts compared to the broader think-pieces that used to interest me. Of course, this is how it should be—they’re fulfilling their stated goals. And I’m not saying I’m not interested in solutions, merely in thinking about stuff; it’s just that I’m a writer and web developer, not an environmental policy maker or urban planner.

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On Sunday I did my first real public talk, promoting Archaeologies of Consciousness at the wonderful Libra Aries bookshop in Cambridge. I’m sure the short course on public speaking that I did near the end of last year in Bristol helped (run very ably by John Dawson). But in the end, I just wonder why I’ve avoided public speaking for so long. Maybe I’ve changed, but I didn’t really get nervous, and really enjoyed it. I read out a short piece I wrote for the event, in the hope that I would kick off what to me would be the most interesting aspect: questions and discussion. Luckily the audience—quite small, but packing out the cosy venue—was engaged and lively, full of interesting information and searching questions.

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I was browsing in a bookshop the other day, and happened across the latest edition of Christopher Hyatt’s Undoing Yourself (2002). I flicked very briefly through it, but immediately came across a section that very pointedly overturned some of my recent inferences about Hyatt’s Reichian model for removing fucked-up human conditioning.

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I rarely get tagged with “blog memes”, and rarely feel like doing them anyway. But the redoubtable Jim has tagged me with something that resonates strongly with my current state of mind, so I’ll play along.

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I never write music reviews. Occasionally I’ll write a post about a band or album I’ve discovered and say a few words, but I’m intensely dissatisfied with any attempt I make to really write about music.

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