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formations in ohio caverns linen postcards, ca. 1940s

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love for cities / love for nature (art requests!)

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At the outset of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells asks his English readers to compare the Martian invasion of Earth with the Europeans’ genocidal invasion of the Tasmanians, thus demanding that the colonizers imagine themselves as the colonized, or the about-to-be-colonized. But in Wells this reversal of perspective entails something more, because the analogy rests on the logic prevalent in contemporary anthropology that the indigenous, primitive other’s present is the colonizer’s own past. Wells’s Martians invading England are like Europeans in Tasmania not just because they are arrogant colonialists invading a technologically inferior civilization, but also because, with their hypertrophied brains and prosthetic machines, they are a version of the human race’s own future.

The confrontation of humans and Martians is thus a kind of anachronism, an incongruous co-habitation of the same moment by people and artifacts from different times. But this anachronism is the mark of anthropological difference, that is, the way late-nineteenth-century anthropology conceptualized the play of identity and difference between the scientific observer and the anthropological subject-both human, but inhabiting different moments in the history of civilization. As George Stocking puts it in his intellectual history of Victorian anthropology, Victorian anthropologists, while expressing shock at the devastating effects of European contact on the Tasmanians, were able to adopt an apologetic tone about it because they understood the Tasmanians as “living representatives of the early Stone Age,” and thus their “extinction was simply a matter of … placing the Tasmanians back into the dead prehistoric world where they belonged” (282-83). The trope of the savage as a remnant of the past unites such authoritative and influential works as Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), where the kinship structures of contemporaneous American Indians and Polynesian islanders are read as evidence of “our” past, with Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), where the sexual practices of “primitive” societies are interpreted as developmental stages leading to the mature sexuality of the West. Johannes Fabian has argued that the repression or denial of the real contemporaneity of so-called savage cultures with that of Western explorers, colonizers, and settlers is one of the pervasive, foundational assumptions of modern anthropology in general. The way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another.

The anachronistic structure of anthropological difference is one of the key features that links emergent science fiction to colonialism. The crucial point is the way it sets into motion a vacillation between fantastic desires and critical estrangement that corresponds to the double-edged effects of the exotic. Robert Stafford, in an excellent essay on “Scientific Exploration and Empire” in the Oxford History of the British Empire, writes that, by the last decades of the century, “absorption in overseas wilderness represented a form of time travel” for the British explorer and, more to the point, for the reading public who seized upon the primitive, abundant, unzoned spaces described in the narratives of exploration as a veritable “fiefdom, calling new worlds into being to redress the balance of the old” (313, 315). Thus when Verne, Wells, and others wrote of voyages underground, under the sea, and into the heavens for the readers of the age of imperialism, the otherworldliness of the colonies provided a new kind of legibility and significance to an ancient plot. Colonial commerce and imperial politics often turned the marvelous voyage into a fantasy of appropriation alluding to real objects and real effects that pervaded and transformed life in the homelands. At the same time, the strange destinations of such voyages now also referred to a centuries-old project of cognitive appropriation, a reading of the exotic other that made possible, and perhaps even necessary, a rereading of oneself.

John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction

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Beach combing by Mia Incantalupo

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i love when a song is an acquired taste. you can listen to something once and go huh. there's something here even if im not quite ready for it yet. and you listen a couple more times. and then bam a couple weeks or months or years later you listen, youve finally worn the song in and it's the most beautiful thing you've ever heard

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like the most politically neutered movie of all time unironically

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良いお年を。

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Sam Keen

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I loved when AI art could never be anything but AI art. the dreams of a computer. now it's all boobs and photorealistic women doing bad kink. but I remember you. I miss you. I love you, Secret Horses.

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Pedro Friedeberg — Kant's Kindergarten (acrylic and ink on board, 1973)

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Fallen snow on Christmas lights.

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sometimes I think too hard about like. how the ability to record audio fundamentally changed how humans interact with music. can you imagine if the only time you ever heard music in your whole life was when you or another human being in your actual physical presence decided to create it. and 99.99% of the time that person was not a professional but just like your wife or your dad or your co-worker or church choir singing or playing whatever they happened to know. i honestly don't think we can fathom it

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Reading through Tales from Earthsea right now, and something that I've found so striking about this one is how much each of the short stories seems to center around turning away from the evils of the world to find something, if not better, then at the very least more true to yourself. Even in a Meta sense, looking back at the past assumptions about how the world of Eathsea functions and giving us accounts that contradict the status quo we've been taught always exists and exists everywhere. Showing us the times when people made the conscious choice to challenge those notions for the sake of something bigger or better than them. And there's always a cost to that choice, it's not shy about showing the painful process and aftermath of choosing a different way than what the world expects of you. If I were to give it a subtitle it would be "the book of change."

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The more things change, the more they stay the same.

(Quote from Ursula Le Guin:)

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation…. It’s unsettling. For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable…. So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks; it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied…advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life-- of a sort, for a while.

Imagination like all living things lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts the empires. The conquerors may leave desert where there was forest and meadow, but the rain will fall, the rivers will run to the sea. The unstable, mutable, untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our kaleidoscopic atlases, and some are more enduring.

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realm for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.

We know a dozen different Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Lois Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.

-Forward to Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin