Teeming Links – July 9, 2013

Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The presiding reflection for today’s offering of recommended and necessary reading and viewing comes from British novelist and essayist Tim Parks, who elicits an important truth about the silence that so many of us seek, or say we think we seek, amid a culture of clamor:

Arguably, when we have a perception of being tormented by noise, a lot of that noise is actually in our heads — the interminable fizz of anxious thoughts or the self-regarding monologue that for much of the time constitutes our consciousness. And it’s a noise in constant interaction with modern methods of so-called communication: the internet, the mobile phone, Google glasses. Our objection to noise in the outer world, very often, is that it makes it harder to focus on the buzz we produce for ourselves in our inner world.

. . . Our desire for silence often has more to do with an inner silence than an outer. Or a combination of the two. Noise provokes our anger, or at least an engagement, and prevents inner silence. But absence of noise exposes us to the loud voice in our heads. This voice is constitutive of what we call self. If we want it to fall silent, aren’t we yearning for the end of self? For death, perhaps. So talk about silence becomes talk about consciousness, the nature of selfhood, and the modern dilemma in general: the desire to invest in the self and the desire for the end of the self.

. . . What silence and meditation leaves us wondering, after we stand up, unexpectedly refreshed and well-disposed after an hour of stillness and silence, is whether there isn’t something deeply perverse in this culture of ours, even in its greatest achievements in narrative and art. So much of what we read, even when it is great entertainment, is deeply unhelpful.

— Tim Parks, “Inner peace,” Aeon, July 26, 2013

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Taken (The New Yorker)
Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing?

Big Banks Conspiracy is Destroying America (Paul B. Farrell for Marketwatch)
How market manipulation is now standard policy as all banks have become Goldman wannabes. “Goldman Sachs has become just another second-stringer in the new global Big Banks Conspiracy as capitalism appears about to self-destruct Adam Smith’s ideal and trigger the third major market crash of the 21st century, followed by a collapse of the economy, driving America and the world deep into a new Great Depression. Be prepared.”

“Organic stories” (The New Inquiry)
Thoughts inspired by Facebook’s recent tweak of its News Feed algorithm. “Facebook is like a television that monitors to see how much you are laughing and changes the channel if it decides you aren’t laughing hard enough. It hopes to engrain in users the idea that if your response to something isn’t recordable, it doesn’t exist, because for Facebook, that is true. Your pleasure is its product, what it wants to sell to marketers, so if you don’t evince it, you are a worthless user wasting Facebook’s server space. In the world according to Facebook, emotional interiority doesn’t exist.”

Arthur Machen’s Stories: What Nightmares Are Made Of (The Wall Street Journal)
“Machen’s fiction calls not for debunking but for the willing suspension of disbelief.”

Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination (Tate)
“Gothic Nightmares explores the work of Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) and William Blake (1757–1827) in the context of the Gothic — the taste for fantastic and supernatural themes which dominated British culture from around 1770 to 1830. Featuring over 120 works by these artists and their contemporaries, the exhibition creates a vivid image of a period of cultural turmoil and daring artistic invention.”

We all have dreaming minds, and we are all capable of being terrified (Tate Etc.)
A conversation between novelists Patrick McGrath and Louise Welsh, held in conjunction with the above-linked Tate exhibit, about horror, gothicism, Fuseli’s “Nightmare,” and the way the dark-dreaming mind has given rise to a genre that has attracted writers, filmmakers, musicians and artists across the centuries.”

‘Angel’ priest visits Missouri accident scene (USA Today)
A pointedly Fortean or Harpurian (think Daimonic Reality) incident that has achieved shocking media prominence in the past couple of days. “Emergency workers and community members in eastern Missouri are not sure what to make of a mystery priest who showed up at a critical accident scene Sunday morning and whose prayer seemed to change life-threatening events for the positive. . . . Even odder, the black-garbed priest does not appear in any of the nearly 70 photos of the scene of the accident in which a 19-year-old girl almost died.”