#but ultimately all religious text are archetypal and metaphorical stories

[5-htagonist]

if i head the words "jesus" "sacrifice" and "himself" in a sentence again ill scream.

[brightbeautifulthings]

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

"'But I think it uses Death as a threat. Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing. And the carnival wisely knows we're more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something. You can fight Something. But ... Nothing? Where do you hit it?'"

Year Read: 2004, 2006, 2018

Rating: 5/5

Context: This has long been my favorite Bradbury book, and it's spawned a love of circus and magician stories that seems doomed to never be satisfied--because what else could ever compare to the magic of this book? I discovered it in high school shortly after reading Fahrenheit 451 for English class, and I read it religiously alongside Flowers in the Attic and The Last Vampire (seemingly the only thing in common is the horror element). I got a fancy new edition for Christmas last year that includes some early drafts and critical commentary, and I managed to save it for this year's Halloween reading list. It's the perfect October novel. Trigger warnings: death, stitches, body horror.

About: It's after midnight in October when the carnival arrives in Green Town, Illinois. Best friends Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, one born a minute before midnight on Halloween and one born a minute after, have never met a carnival that came so late in the year. And it's no ordinary carnival. At first glance, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show is the average carnival with rides, cotton candy, and sideshow freaks. But the House of Mirrors is an ocean of rippling glass that threatens to show men their greatest fears, the carousel holds a sinister secret, and the answered dreams offered by Cooger & Dark may really be the stuff of nightmares.

Thoughts: Bradbury's prose is incomparable. I've never met another writer with his flair for imagery, for turning a phrase just so and making it something new, and for tapping into what seem like eternal truths with his sentences. This is the writer that made me see what writing could be, who taught me how to write description, and who made me want to be a writer. His words have a way of brushing the dust off those innermost parts of people--youth, dreams, love, magic--and bringing them back to life. It's no wonder that I was obsessed with him as a teenager and that, even as an adult, I never really got over it. I may have newer, more current author obsessions, but all it takes is cracking a Bradbury book to remind me why I love language.

The text is heavy with imagery, perhaps even a little above Bradbury's usual descriptions, and that's not going to work for every reader. Some people will accuse his prose of being "purple", which is one of my least favorite complaints ever in reviews--but of course it is, because I learned to love twisting metaphor and vivid imagery heaped by the pile at the knee of writers like Bradbury. While I know I flew through this novel many times in high school, I found myself wanting to slow down and let the pages sink in this time around. There's so much atmosphere to take in. We can hear the calliope, smell the crisp autumn air, and feel the cool thrill of fear as our heroes are threatened.

Will and Jim were some of my first literary friends, and they're among Bradbury's most well-developed characters. He doesn't often linger on character the way he does moral or description, but that's not the case in Something Wicked. Will and Jim are mainly defined by their contrast to each other: light and shadow, easy and hard, content and restless, but Bradbury walks a thin line on making them good and evil. There's nothing so black and white about their characters; this book is about the possibility of evil, and none of the characters are exempt from temptation. Will's father, Charles Halloway, the aging janitor/librarian, could so easily fall into cliches as well, but he doesn't. He's as flawed and fragile as the children, but he's also the model of strength and goodness they need to fight back against the carnival.

No carnival in literary history has ever compared to Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show (a delightful name if there ever was one). Bradbury's prose brings its darkness to life like no other, and it's populated by some truly terrifying characters. I would hesitate to call this a horror novel (perhaps dark fantasy or coming of age), but it has some of the most frightening scenes I've ever encountered. Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man, is a menacing, calculating villain with a menagerie of writhing tattoos and perfectly timed dramatics (as all magicians should be). There are a number of other spooky minor characters, but the Dust Witch is the true horror of the story. Eyes stitched shut, clawed fingers carving out destinies in the air, she's capable of stopping hearts with mere suggestion. (There are some misuses of the word "gypsy" in her case, so be aware.)

The second half of the plot is especially tense as our heroes are still fumbling to find suitable weapons against the carnival's evil. It's hard to see how two boys and an old man can fight against decades, possibly centuries, of wickedness, but Bradbury's solutions are as simple as they are universal. The novel's conclusion could have easily passed into cliche, but it still feels as fresh and surprising on a re-read as it did the first time I read it. Bradbury proves himself as skilled at clever plotting as he is everything else. It's still one of my favorite novels, and every other circus story pales in comparison.

As far as the critical commentary goes in my new edition, it’s a little sparse to be entirely satisfying. Truth be told, I would probably read an entire book dedicated to that stuff. Reading about the long process of turning this into a novel and some of Bradbury’s early drafts where Will was the narrator was fascinating (and I’m glad he ultimately went with third person narration). There are also a few excerpts of other authors on Bradbury that I may have to look into, although Stephen King’s is especially snobbish. His reduction of the characters to mere archetypes is more of a comment on his own cynicism than the novel itself. Of course, it’s possible to approach the novel that way, but one would risk missing the point.

[audiopedia2016]

What is EPISTEMIC COMMUNITY? What does EPISTEMIC COMMUNITY mean? EPISTEMIC COMMUNITY meaning - EPISTEMIC COMMUNITY definition - EPISTEMIC COMMUNITY explanation. Source: Wikipedia.org article, adapted under http://ift.tt/yjiNZw license. An epistemic community is a transnational network of knowledge-based experts who help decision-makers to define the problems they face, identify various policy solutions and assess the policy outcomes. The definitive conceptual framework of an epistemic community is widely accepted as that of Peter M. Haas. He describes them as "...a network of professionals with recognised expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area.":3 Although the members of an epistemic community may originate from a variety of academic or professional backgrounds, they are linked by a set of unifying characteristics for the promotion of collective amelioration and not collective gain. This is termed their "normative component". In the big picture, epistemic communities are socio-psychological entities that create and justify knowledge. Such communities can constitute of only two persons and yet gain an important role in building knowledge on any specific subject. Miika Vähämaa has recently suggested that epistemic communities consist of persons being able to understand, discuss and gain self-esteem concerning the matters being discussed. Some theorists argue that an epistemic community may consist of those who accept one version of a story, or one version of validating a story. Michel Foucault referred more elaborately to mathesis as a rigorous episteme suitable for enabling cohesion of a discourse and thus uniting a community of its followers. In philosophy of science and systems science the process of forming a self-maintaining epistemic community is sometimes called a mindset. In politics, a tendency or faction is usually described in very similar terms. Most researchers carefully distinguish between epistemic forms of community and "real" or "bodily" community which consists of people sharing risk, especially bodily risk. It is also problematic to draw the line between modern ideas and more ancient ones, for example, Joseph Campbell's concept of myth from cultural anthropology, and Carl Jung's concept of archetype in psychology. Some consider forming an epistemic community a deep human need, and ultimately a mythical or even religious obligation. Among these very notably are E. O. Wilson, as well as Ellen Dissanayake, an American historian of aesthetics who famously argued that almost all of our broadly shared conceptual metaphors centre on one basic idea of safety: that of "home". From this view, an epistemic community may be seen as a group of people who do not have any specific history together, but search for a common idea of home as if forming an intentional community. For example, an epistemic community can be found in a network of professionals from a wide variety of disciplines and backgrounds. As discussed in Peter M. Haas's definitive text, an epistemic community is made up of a diverse range of academic and professional experts, who are allied on the basis of four unifying characteristics: 1. a shared set of normative and principled beliefs which provide a value-based rationale for the social action of community members; 2. shared causal beliefs which are derived from their analysis of practices leading or contributing to a central set of problems in their domain and which then serve as the basis for elucidating the multiple linkages between possible policy actions and desired outcomes; 3. shared notions of validity, i.e. intersubjective, internally defined criteria for weighing and validating knowledge in the domain of their expertise; and 4. a common policy enterprise, or a set of common practices associated with a set of problems to which their professional competence is directed, presumably out of the conviction that human welfare will be enhanced as a consequence. Thus, when viewed as an epistemic community, the overall enterprise of the expert members emerges as the product of a combination of shared beliefs and more subtle conformity pressures, rather than a direct drive for concurrence (Michael J. Mazarr). Epistemic communities also have a "normative component" meaning the end goal is always for the betterment of society, rather than self gain of the community itself (Peter M. Haas). In international relations and political science, an epistemic community can also be referred to as a global network of knowledge-based professionals in scientific and technological areas that often affect policy decisions.