Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
To preface today’s offering of recommended and required reading, here’s a not-so-idle speculation from Damien Walter about the momentous fact of our collective cultural obsession with losing ourselves in the ever more immersive fantasy worlds that digital technology has enabled for us:
I am a writer and critic of fantasy, and for most of my life I have been an escapist. Born in 1977, the year in which Star Wars brought cinematic escapism to new heights, I have seen TV screens grow from blurry analogue boxes to high-definition wide-screens the size of walls. I played my first video game on a rubber-keyed Sinclair ZX Spectrum and have followed the upgrade path through Mega Drive, PlayStation, Xbox and high-powered gaming PCs that lodged supercomputers inside households across the developed world. I have watched the symbolic language of fantasy â of dragons, androids, magic rings, warp drives, haunted houses, robot uprisings, zombie armageddons and the rest — shift from the guilty pleasure of geeks and outcasts to become the diet of mainstream culture.
And I am not alone. Iâm emblematic of an entire generation who might, when our history is written, be remembered first and foremost for our exodus into digital fantasy. . . . Immersion has . . . become the mantra of modern escapist fantasy, and the creation of seamless secondary worlds its mission. We hunger for an escape so complete it borders on oblivion: the total eradication of self and reality beneath a superimposed fantasy. . . . Weâre embarking on a daring social experiment: the immersion of an entire generation into digitally generated escapist fantasies of unprecedented depth and complexity. And the most remarkable aspect of this potential revolution is how little consideration we are giving it.
— Damien Walter, “The Great Escape,” Aeon, July 12, 2013
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A Confederacy of Lunches (The New York Times)
Christopher Buckley reviews Mark Leibovich’s This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — Plus Plenty of Valet Parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital. “Not to ruin it for you, but: if you already hate Washington, you’re going to hate it a whole lot more after reading Mark Leibovich’s takedown of the creatures who infest our nation’s capital and rule our destinies.”
Who Are We At War With? That’s Classified (Pro Publica)President Obama has repeatedly said the U.S. is targeting Al Qaeda and âassociated forces.â But the government wonât say who those forces are.
Halliburton pleads guilty to destroying Gulf oil spill evidence (Reuters)
The government said the guilty plea is the third by a company over the spill, and requires the world’s second-largest oilfield services company to pay a maximum $200,000 statutory fine.
Feds tell Web firms to turn over user account passwords (CNET)
Secret demands mark escalation in Internet surveillance by the federal government through gaining access to user passwords, which are typically stored in encrypted form.
The Charitable-Industrial Complex (The New York Times)
“As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to ‘give back.’ Itâs what I would call ‘conscience laundering’ — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.”
The hour of anthropology may have struck (Toronto Star)
“The strength of anthropology at the moment comes when it turns its eye to our own society as just another tribe or collection of humans trying to make symbolic sense of their experience. We start looking like just another weird bunch of human creatures trying to make sense of their odd predicament, like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes when he finally gets it.”
The MOOC Racket (Slate)
Widespread online-only higher ed will be disastrous for students — and most professors.
E-book vs. P-book (The New Yorker)
On the persistence of the paper codex book in an age when so many are predicting its demise. “For many people, as a number of studies show, reading is a genuinely tactile experience — how a book feels and looks has a material impact on how we feel about reading. This isnât necessarily Luddism or nostalgia. The truth is that the book is an exceptionally good piece of technology.”
Thank You, Barnes and Noble (The New Yorker)
Michael Aggers on the literary and intellectual joy that B&N brought to his teen years in a small Pennsylvania town. “It was as if a small liberal-arts college had been plunked down into a farm field. . . . Iâll be rooting for you, Barnes & Noble, however you reinvent yourself. Iâve come to see that, despite your flaws, you were a suburban beacon of knowledge, history, and community — noble indeed.”
Creative differences (Financial Times)
Three great film directors — Orson Welles, Nicolas Roeg, and Roman Polanski — offer a glimpse into the complex life and work of the auteur. “Todayâs directors are less monstrous, and altogether more respectful of the tiresome fact that cinema is a collaborative art form. Put it down to sharper accountants, blander movie stars, infernally complex technological demands. It is more difficult than ever to be a legend in your own lunchtime, and thatâs a shame.”
The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema (The New York Review of Books)
A brilliant essay — deeply informed by an expansive knowledge of history and art, and written by none other than Martin Scorsese — on the signal importance of become literate in the visual language of cinema at a time when we’re awash in a sea of images all around us.
Enlightenment Engineer (Wired)
Meditation and mindfulness are the new rage in Silicon Valley. And itâs not just about inner peace — itâs about getting ahead.
Spirit Possession Here and Now (Reality Sandwich)
Interview with Margaret De Wys, author of the recently published Ecstatic Healing: A Journey into the Shamanic World of Spirit Possession and Miraculous Medicine. “My acceptance of possession turned out to be my spiritual path. That was my choice and it wasnât an easy one.”
Mysterious Hum Driving People Crazy Around the World (LiveScience)
It’s known as the Hum, a steady, droning sound that’s heard in places as disparate as Taos, N.M.; Bristol, England; and Largs, Scotland. But what causes the Hum, and why it only affects a small percentage of the population in certain areas, remain a mystery, despite a number of scientific investigations.
Psi in the News – July 17, 2013 (Reality Sandwich)
The latest installment of David Metcalfe’s ongoing roundup of parapsychologically-oriented links. Exceptionally rich.
It sounds like Margaret might have offered herself to the Nether-World of hungry ghosts. I wish more people were more explicit I think she has dodged around the submissive tendency within mediumship to make it seem as though she is in control and when she does is this it calls into question how real her experience was.
I’ve become familiar with the total opposite perespective, if you initiate and lose sole sovereignty of your consciousness it becomes very hard not to deprecate yourself and be distressed. We’re talking about an irreversible experience here.
All of these positive books on shamanism I think they lose face for the reader quickly because there is no logical way that possession and medium ship is positive. Its an affliction. Even regular human beings reading this stuff know this innately. The fear is important but also most importantly sincere. Shamans heal from knowledge of sickness. There is a severe lack of intellectual honesty about what the expernce is really like in the new age community.
There is no way she’s the real deal for me. People don’t come into you, you bring them into you and you go into others. It’s an extremely solitary and subjective experience. In fact, objective possession is impossible.
My first sentence about the hungry ghosts yeah that was the interviewer saying she had surrendered. What she is saying in response is different. I really don’t get the impression of any affliction .
Shamanism is the very thing that brings you to psychiatric emergency. Mediums are sick, not healed. They heal with their sickness.
Fundamental.
Totally wrong message out there.
I use the western English word sick I should probably use the word mad. Or frenzy. Coleridge’s ancient mariner is not sick but his glittering eye is not human and his energy level conveys that there is more beyond within him than his singular body would suggest.