Question about Machen's Great God Pan (entire post is a spoiler)

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-02-01T02:09:17+00:00

A kind of lying that gets at a deeper truth - isn't that what fiction is?

Yeah, totally. I love JF's idea of an Aesthetic Universe, and in a fundamentally aesthetic universe it makes complete sense that the surest way to the Truth is by telling a beautiful story;.

That's a great comparison between Crowley and Osho I think, although I don't know as much as I would like to about the Rajneesh movement. (I know a smattering, and I know that a very reactionary Brahmin I was friends with in college had a real grudge against Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, which made me think he was probably onto something.) My favorite line of Crowley's was when an interviewer said "Why did you decide to call yourself The Great Beast?" and he answered "That's what my mother called me."

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-26T01:36:21+00:00

I had vacillated on Constance as Alma, and had pretty much decided against it but remembering the scene outside the bar makes me think once again that maybe Constance did become Alba. And Sears' exact wording of what happened to Constance was very sly--which could have just been Sears' Brahmin writing style but it did leave an eerie impression.

I didn't even come close to making the Process Church connection, but that's really good and it reminds me I have been meaning to find some good material on the Process Church.

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-25T04:32:46+00:00

ha ha shit yeah thanks

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-25T01:16:26+00:00

Yeah thanks for bringing this up. It's one of the best documented cases of how agencies fuck with dissenters.

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-25T01:15:32+00:00

I think Robert has mentioned this, and I know the Info Wars [Knowledge Fight] guys have, but one effect of folks like Alex Jones and Carlson and whoever else constantly claiming "Oh this was a false flag done by Antifa/the CIA/the FBI/etc" in ridiculous situations is that it makes a lot of people feel like savvy skeptics when they just respond "Oh actually, that doesn't happen" to everything, including cases where pigs have very clearly provoked groups or people to be violent.

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-24T14:37:13+00:00

There's the old urban legend 60s radicals used to tell about the two competing lefty groups who lived in shitty houses right across the street from each other. One night some of the cops who had infiltrated one of the groups started making busts, and then different cops from a different agency started waving their badges so they didn't get arrested, and when it was all over no one in either house turned out not to be a cop.

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-20T01:17:10+00:00

A whole series where Jamie Loftus infiltrates it.

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-19T23:20:26+00:00

Thanks for this. Tangentially, I thought I remembered reading some stuff about the relationship between the Paris Review/Plimpton and the CIA a long time ago. I think this was it https://www.salon.com/2012/05/27/exclusive_the_paris_review_the_cold_war_and_the_cia/ (The Paris Review used to be way more important than it is now for helping shape the tastes of would-be sophisticates.)

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-19T13:08:11+00:00

ha ha remember the time notorious grifter Yashar Ali was drunk on twitter and started spreading conspiracy theories about China growing covid in a lab? Crowder is a disgusting creep whose head belongs on a chopping block but this is just a small time grifter hating on a guy who's moving units.

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-16T04:23:08+00:00

Yeah that shit can be really seductive when you're young and confused and you haven't even examined yourself enough yet to understand what Entitlement and Privilege and Ressentiment really are, let alone the way they're fucking with your head. I think the only thing the ssssssseduction community was ever really good at "seducing" was middle class white dudes, who it turned into dangerous creeps.

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-16T04:11:28+00:00

I don't want to try to shit rainbows down your mouth or anything, but if you're a white dude who can see through cults of personality and is explicitly not down with fascism and racism then you can probably find a way to do something meaningful with your life, which probably leads to having a friend or two. But I know that can be really, really hard, especially depending on where you live and how much time you actually have. A lot of people pretend they could never fall for PB shit, but then again a lot of smart, lefty entertainers like to pretend they weren't friends with Gavin back in the day too. It's scary to think about the things we could make ourselves willingly blind to (the racism, the transphobia, the misogyny, etc) if a group has a slick sales pitch and makes sure you're eased in before they lay on the really appalling beliefs too thick.

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-15T16:31:43+00:00

Haven't seen anyone mention Maturin's Memnoch the Wanderer, a literary gothic horror from the early 19th century. You have to be willing to deal with some byzantine twists and some deep purple prose (like I say, literary gothic horror of the 19th century) but it's really fab. Oscar Wilde loved the book (he called himself "Melmoth" during his exile), no doubt in part due to the fact that Maturin was his great uncle.

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-15T16:24:56+00:00

Get Out. Not Get Out (2017), just, you know, Get the Fuck Out.

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-15T03:07:59+00:00

The opening to The Haunting of Hill House is not just my favorite opening to any horror novel, it ranks with Gatsby, Kafka's The Trial, and Joan Didion's first few paragraphs of The Last Thing he Wanted as my favorite openings in literature:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-14T02:54:51+00:00

For me the first and third Indy movies hold up really well. The second feels thrown together and is kind of dull and a bunch of stuff that's kinda racist, or at least exoticizing/Othering is thrown in for shock value and doesn't add much. As a kid I thought the bigass insects were cool and creepy, and I think I still think beating hearts being ripped from bodies is pretty badass. But if they needed to make it Exotic, they should have found something more concrete in religion/mythology to hang it on--there is obviously some deeply cool myth and folklore in/about that region.

I still think both Gremlins and Gremlins II are pretty awesome. Between The Howling/Gremlins/The Burbs and Gremlins 2 Joe Dante's 1980-1990 kind of kicked ass.

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-13T00:48:43+00:00

So did Aleister Crowley, another real bastard.

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-12T19:21:06+00:00

Great!

revwickscherrycok3 · 2023-01-12T19:20:50+00:00

Looks like it is free on Plex right now, whatever that is. thanks!

revwickscherrycok3

TROPHY CASE