catalog

Well-known member
off topic but i think the flattened globe is the right metaphor for thinking about models and diagrams. so basically a spherical object that can "sit" somewhere. so therefore also an atom. rather than a flat circle or quadrant.

this allows you a lot of scope with all the metaphors you need. like you can have inside and outside.

you can also have the all-important thing of going left, so left that you end up on the right.

and you can reach the other side by going through.

if everyone did their models and diagrams in 3d like this, we'd see some progression.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Hilarious section this morning where he elucidates his various methods for stone-sucking, with his 16 stones spread across 4 pockets. He worries that each stone will not get sucked an equal amount of times, so ponders how to split them across his pockets, settling for 5, 5 and 6, with one pocket empty, after deciding that 4 in each is no good.

He's gotta be a WW1 soldier returned home with PTSD right? Lots of references to his greatcoat and he's trying to find his way home...
 

catalog

Well-known member
Just finished part 1. Surprised in a good way of the sudden turn and change of pace with the new character.

Really love the bit where he's in the forest and there's some otherworldly thing going on. My reading coincided with my own forest adventures, lost and disoriented trying to find the Roman kiln, so there was a good sync going on.

"The forest was all about me and the boughs, twining together at a prodigious height, compared to mine, sheltered me from the light and the elements.

Some days I advanced no more than thirty or forty paces, I give you my oath. To say I stumbled in inpenetrable darkness, no, I cannot. I stumbled, but the darkness was not inpenetrable.

For there reigned a kind of blue gloom, more than sufficient for my visual needs. I was astonished, this gloom was not green, rather than blue, but I saw it blue and perhaps it was. The red of the sun mingling with the green of the leaves, gave a blue result, that is how I reasoned."

The highlighted part particularly resonant for me, cos I've written quite a lot myself about night time city lights, red and blue predominantly, and what they mean. That use of "gloom" is very apt.

And a couple of pages later:

"I see smoke somewhere, that's something that never escapes me, smoke."

I've also been reading the odd page of Robert Graves "The White Goddess" and see the constant search for his mother as perhaps a yearning to reestablish some kind of primal relationship:

"All my life, I think i had been going to my mother."

And there's also a very funny bit which put me in mind of Bataille's "Solar anus":

"We underestimate this little hole, it seems to me, we call it the arse-hole and affect to despise it. But is it not rather the true portal of our being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen door.

Nothing goes in, or so little, that is not rejected on the spot, or very nearly. Almost everything revolts it that comes from without.

And what comes from within does not seem to receive a warm welcome either. Are not these significant facts."

They certainly are mate! Cheersniceone.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
And there's also a very funny bit which put me in mind of Bataille's "Solar anus":

"We underestimate this little hole, it seems to me, we call it the arse-hole and affect to despise it. But is it not rather the true portal of our being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen door.

Nothing goes in, or so little, that is not rejected on the spot, or very nearly. Almost everything revolts it that comes from without.

And what comes from within does not seem to receive a warm welcome either. Are not these significant facts."

They certainly are mate! Cheersniceone.

I was reading Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm last night and your comments reminded me of this amusing passage about Viking toilets:

They are among the most unpleasant elements of early medieval life to excavate, especially if the ground is waterlogged, thus preserving everything inside the latrines in pristine condition, still moist and with its original bouquet; I once spent a nasty week trying to hold my breath while digging to the base of one in York. Inside are clumps of moss used as toilet paper, the scraps of cloth that were the Viking equivalent of sanitary towels, and, occasionally, all manner of other objects that people had dropped while otherwise engaged but sensibly decided not to retrieve. Latrines are also an environmental archaeologist's dream: coprolites (preserved faeces ) can be tested for intestinal parasites, reconstructing Viking-Age gut flora and health; remains of seeds, proteins, and other food detritus give clues to diet.

The "little hole" is truly a portal to the past...
 

william_kent

Well-known member
It's a pity that psychogeography isn't a real career, I reckon you would be a high earner judging by your search for the tilery- I'd quite fancy it myself, just wandering around Urbis and the Corn Exchange ( "Triangle" ) in Manchester City Centre and imagining John Dee pottering about..
 

catalog

Well-known member
Hah - yeah. I should be charging someone £20 per hour for the 3 hours I spent wandering about in garlic on Tuesday. All your fault really, with those Viking videos :ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:.

have you ever been to chetham's library near the triangle?

the librarian there, if he's still there, a guy called fergus iirc, did this really good tour of the place where he talked about how Dee was sent up to MCR on the pretext of figuring out the whereabouts of some missing Crown funds.

The real reason is that he was becoming too unhinged and weird, bit of an embarrassment at Court, so he was basically put out to gardening leave, with a fake mission, with the hope that he would vanish into obscurity.

But, it didn't quite work out that way. Not only did he figure out that the missing money was the Crown basically stealing from itself in order to divert money to nefarious causes (I guess a bit like Iran-Contra or something). Alan Moore also talks about him "inventing" Manchester, although I'm not exactly sure what he means by that. But I suppose probably things like Chetham's (the world's first public library!) and other institutions may have had a guiding hand from Dee.

I went on this other tour a few years ago, led by Morag Rose https://twitter.com/thelrm "the loiterer's resistance movement" and they were talking about MAP (Manchester Area Psychogeographic) and how they tried to levitate the Corn exchange.

Dissensus' very own John Eden interviewed MAP http://www.twentythree.plus.com/MAP/interview.html
 

william_kent

Well-known member
I'm just going to post this here so I can watch it later - there was a time when Channel 4 wasn't all property porn - featuring Coil on the soundtrack, Alan Moore, etc


Masters of Darkness - John Dee

There was once a really good late night series on Granada, which I've now forgotten the name of, but that doesn't matter because my friend emailed the director to try and get hold of copies, and turns out it was recorded on some obsolete media and chucked out, so it's lost to the mists of time...anyway, the theme was hidden Manchester, and it featured all sorts of local characters - squatters, free party people, junkies, BDSM types, and occultists - one of my favourite episodes featured David Rietti, head of the O.T.O. Foundation, a rebel magickal order formed after he was expelled from the Caliphate O.T.O. - he was filmed wandering around the Corn Exchange and reminiscing about his previous life when he was John Dee ( the article below mentions that he is also the reincarnation of Aleister Crowley )..

As a bonus here is some alternative Manchester history from the pages of KAOS ( one of the best occult 'zines ever ) regarding David Rietti and the O.T.O.F:

Ben Fernee, the Caliphate OTO, and the “Black Magus of Manchester” affair

Ben Fernee made public his expulsion from the Caliphate oto in the spring of 1999 for supposedly selling the Order’s secrets. Fernee, as a secondhand book dealer specialising in occult books, had put together a book list announcing a number of rare Crowley items from a private collection. Three items were singled out for special attention by Bill Heidrick and Soror Helena of the Caliphate Supreme Council: a handwritten variant by Crowley of De Natura Deorum (a secret sex magick instruction of the seventh degree) significantly different from that found in Francis King’s Secret Rituals of the OTO and in the original manuscript at the Warburg; Koenig’s book How to Make Your Own OTO; and an early typescript version of the fourth degree (Lodge of Perfection) with a handwritten note by Gerald Yorke saying this version of the ritual was abandoned because of objections from freemasons that it was too close to their own Royal Arch rite. On that last item, incidentally, it might be noted that the penalty in the published 4° ritual—“having my skull sawn off and my brains exposed to the searing rays of the Sun”—is a direct rip-off from freemasonry. It is the explanation of the symbolism of the skull placed in the temple during the installation of a candidate as a member of the masonic Order of Knight Templars.
In March 1999 Fernee publicly laid open at length on the Internet the Caliphate OTO’s persecution of him and stressed that he had never sold any materials obtained through his membership of the oto, but in a post on alt.magick, May 31, 1999, he reported that he had just been expelled. Fernee’s statements were a powerful indictment of the petty politics at the heart of Bill Breeze’s Caliphate. In my own considered opinion, it was probably the significantly different variant of the seventh degree sex magick instruction by Crowley that they couldn’t bear the thought of being available, let alone advertised for sale to all bidders by one of their own. Had they acted with the dignity befitting a magical Order pursuing the Great Work they might have just quietly purchased it themselves, as it turned out to this day they do not know what it contains nor do they know its new owner. Fernee, on the strict instructions of the private collector who was selling these items, allowed no-one to view them, regarding the information as being for the new owner alone. I might also add that a copy of Francis King’s Secret Rituals of the OTO that I borrowed from the British Library’s Boston Spa facility has an interesting pencil annotation specifically appended to De Natura Deorum, with no further pencil marks anywhere in the book. I considered rubbing it out, but no, it is still there, for all I know it may be of historical importance. What does it say? Now that would be telling. Ask me in the pub.
Ben Fernee was involved as the Caliphate’s “Inquisitor” of David Rietti (“Frater Prospero”, formerly “Fr. Thanatos”) in 1995, who oldtime KAOS readers will remember as the pompous oaf who once threatened me with a libel suit for an attack on his good name and reputation, upon which a barrister at Gray’s Inn I asked to comment said after studying the relevant documents: “It would be difficult to lower Mr Rietti’s reputation further in the eyes of right thinking people.” Rietti, now the “Black Magus of Manchester” and another reincarnation of John Dee (in the 80s he used to be Aleister Crowley, who himself claimed to be the reincarnation of Dee’s magical partner Edward Kelly, so that posits some intriguing questions), was expelled from the Caliphate OTO along with his wife Irene Fraenkl-Rietti (“Soror Phoenix”) at the end of January 1996 for a catalogue of misdemeanours hard to fathom in their entirety (frankly, I can’t be bothered) but on a cursory glance at the evidence it seems to involve them garnering business for their tattoo parlour—“Tattooed Lady Body Art”—from oto initiates (the fifth degree, in particular, requires the candidate to get tattooed). The entire transcript of Fernee’s Inquisition of the Riettis is quite hilarious, particularly the first line by David Rietti, and is on the web at: https://www.parareligion.ch/dplanet/inquisition/trans.htm
As a result of this expulsion, Rietti set up the “Ordo Templi Orientis Foundation”, complete with a Panamanian registry like many a rustbucket shipping line. He announced his new oto on April 22, 1996, on various magical newsgroups on the Internet, primarily to piss off the Caliphate OTO. The actual foundation of the oto Foundation is quite intriguing and raised an interesting question about “hidden lineages”. A mysterious magus known as “Master Scorpio” claimed to possess the “Pentalpha” authority of the Fraternitas Saturni, giving him the power to bestow upon Rietti his very own oto, and a whole gaggle of Manchester Caliphate OTO groupies fell for it hook, line, and sinker and defected or were similarly expelled. It is said that being of the 18th degree of the Fraternitas Saturni gives one the power to create an oto. And because few people in the occult possess the confidence to declare this a load of cobblers, lest they look like uninitiated fools, yet another oto dangles by a slender thread of credibility. Thus David Rietti is now the Supreme and Most Holy King of the oto Foundation, and his grand palace is c/o New Aeon Books, Manchester.
“Master Scorpio” is in fact Ralph Tegtmeier, currently a software developer in Belgium who is better known as Frater U∴D∴ (who was Frater V∴D∴ before he changed his magical name on being published in America, it wouldn’t have done his sales any good on his sex magick book). Frater U∴D∴ has the rare distinction of being expelled from the German iot (Illuminates of Thanateros)—which has the motto “...Everything is Permitted”—for “abusing his position and membership of an ultra right-wing mind- control cult” as the mild-mannered Pete Carroll put it, referring to Tegtmeier’s “Ice Magic Wars” and the formation of RIOT.
 

version

Well-known member
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Michael Caine's let himself go.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Back on track... I'm horrified how Beckett has been appropriated by tech bro types as a source of motivational quotes - this one from Worstward Ho is like something my managers would come out with:

1620931521503.png

But the oddest and most thematically dissonant invocation of the quote I’ve ever come across—and I’m inclined at this point to go ahead and call it a motto—was at the closing session of a major technology conference in Dublin last October. The stage was shared by Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, Elon Musk (founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX), and Shervin Pishevar (billionaire venture capitalist, romantic consort of Tyra Banks). The interviewer closed the talk—the dual focus of which had been Musk’s extraordinary career and the role of the tech sector in Ireland’s economic recovery—by giving the last word to Beckett: “I remember being told the Samuel Beckett line, that great line; he said ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ And that’s what keeps me going, in many ways.”
 

version

Well-known member
Something which occurred to me whilst reading Molloy was the issue with his legs may be Beckett's issue with language.

He talked about wanting to get away from English and its structures and restrictions and initially wrote the trilogy in French and I wonder whether French began to go the same way for him as he became more comfortable with it: the good leg (French) stiffening like the bad (English).
 
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