jeregenest

Double feature because there was too much good content this week.

I'm going to take the rare step of recommending a two-part episode before I've finished listening to part 2, because I've listened to the Conspirituality episode on the same subject and I know who Peter Thiel thinks is the Antichrist. Through all of part 1 and the beginning of part 2 of Behind the Bastards' "Peter Thiel and the Anti-Christ" you can just feel Robert getting increasingly excited about telling Sarah Marshall who Thiel thinks the Antichrist is and she keeps guessing and getting close but missing, critically, how fucking insane Thiel is.

You should listen to this because the people making all of the decisions in our lives with all of the money are actually batshit and believe batshit things and we all need to adjust our political strategies accordingly.

The flipside is Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff's "The Gallae: Trans Priestesses of Ancient Rome," where Magpie talks to Gabriel Dunn about how ancient trans women were persecuted but powerful and badass, into noise music, and did rave culture. Part 1, part 2. Not as much on Sumerian civilization as I'd like but maybe that's another episode.

HAPPY SPOOOOKY DAY and blessed Samhain if that's your thing.

This week's podcast episode sure is spooooooky! It's It Could Happen Here's "Occulture, William S. Burroughs, and Generative AI," and the moment that title popped up in my feed, I knew I'd be talking about it (even though I Don't Speak German covered Mother Night, this week, which is my favourite Vonnegut book. Maybe I'll talk about that one next week). 

I had never heard of the Occulture conference, which is...what you think it is. As a good little Marxist materialist, I am not a chaos magick practitioner or believer as such except that definitely magic and the occult are a terrain we should not cede to the enemy so I am not not a chaos magick believer, y'know? At the very least as a philosophical and narrative system it's something that I'm quite interested in.

And of course for all his being one of the most Problematic Faves of all my Problematic Faves—he killed his wife ffs—I never really got over my teenage obsession with William S. Burroughs. As the episode points out, he's lumped in with the Beats but more properly belongs with the Surrealists (and the Dadaists) in terms of what he was doing. And y'all know how I feel about the Surrealists and the Dadaists. So there's an unexpected amount of discussion of Burroughs as a magickian at the the conference and his techniques (some of which were extremely funny, such as cursing a restaurant that took his favourite thing off the menu) and particularly his use of technology to channel the non-human.

Which brings me to the argument that I get into way too fucking much, which is "well isn't GenAI basically the same as cut-up poetry," and that's apparently something that was asked repeatedly at this conference. Spoiler: No it is not. Like, neither artistically nor magickically, which is a relief as that wasn't necessarily where the discussion might have gone. The short version has to do with Third Mind theory, which is quite interesting, and again, I feel there's a much more materialist explanation for why it's not the same but I also appreciate the occultist explanation. 

Anyway it's a big meaty feast for my special interests and apparently there will be a second part dropping this weekend, so yay!

Just finished: The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl B. Klein. I don't really have a lot to add: This was good and useful, especially if you're in the revision stage of a project, which I am not. It weirdly made me want to read a few of the books that it talks about as examples, though with my TBR list as it is and a general disinterest in YA literature, I likely won't.

Currently reading: Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. It's time, fuckos! I've had a hold on this one since I read a bad review of it. I have heard that Kuang often doesn't land her endings, which I hope is not the case, because this has one of the best openings I've come across in a good long time. It begins with Alice Law, a postgrad in linguistic magick, preparing a chalk circle to go to Hell to retrieve the soul of her recently dead advisor, Professor Grimes, because he's on her dissertation committee and is her only chance to get tenure. The cost for going to Hell and returning is half your remaining lifespan, but Alice is more than willing to pay that in exchange for having a stable job, making her possibly the most relatable character in genre fiction. Her plans are interrupted by Peter, her hated academic rival and the department's golden boy, who insists on coming with her even though his prospects for career advancement are much better than hers.

Anyway this is completely hilarious and painful and only an inconvenient need to work and sleep is keeping me from it at the moment.