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culture

Rebuilding Culture from the Ground Up.

May 21, 2013 by Exangel

One of my most cherished possessions is a 1911 edition of the Encylopedia Brittanica—in fact, I have two sets, one in my own home base, in the woods of Oregon, and one borrowed from the university library, in Boulder. Cherished not just for the humane, clear learning that leaps out of every article, but for the long lost world view underlying it. These writers were late Victorians, men and (all too rarely) women writing at the start of the last century, and their confidence in agreed upon truths is breathtaking. Every word shows an absolute belief that most of the Truths of the Universe had been uncovered, codified, integrated into a harmonious view of what Man (although not, significantly, Woman) could, should, and would be. Any mysteries, these writers clearly felt, would inevitably be solved in what amounted to no more than a mopping up exercise.Civilization and its move forward was assured.

That was 1911. Right before the outbreak of the First World War. That war, and the unprecedented  barbarity of both sides in the Second World War, shattered that enviable illusion into a million pieces.

After World War II, there was no belief any longer that the culture was built out of agreed and time-tested truths. Instead the structure had fallen into pieces, and each specialty now stood on its own: science, art, literature, economics, history, politics, religion. Each was split from what had been a whole, and each began the work of developing itself in isolation. Those wars had shattered the self-confidence on which Western Thought was built, and a good thing, too, since that thought had arrogantly assumed that the tiny, admittedly exquisite structure it had built in a small corner of a vast, unknowable universe was the whole of knowledge. It was as if the two Great Wars—reallly, just one interrupted war that lasted fifty years—were a tsunami that washed away the little fortress of Western civilization perched so precariously on the edge of a rock, washed it away and left it in fragments on the beach.

So that’s us now, rebuilding in the flotsam and jetsum. And it wouldn’t be such a bad thing except that, for the last sixty years, we’ve maintained the arrogance without the structure to back it up. We’ve acted as if the little bits left after the destruction of that beautiful world view were still of absolute value, and we’ve tried to rebuild what we had with those old, wrecked materials. Here we have an opportunity to get creative, to think of new ways, new ideas, new stories, and we’re clinging to old, discredited techniques and materials.

But that looks to be changing. As usual after any disaster, it’s the individuals, and the communities made up of individuals, the people on the ground who are seeing that in order to build up a new, flexible, workable whole world, all the different categories kept artifically apart now need to come together to exchange information.

Physicists need to talk to plumbers Urban planners need to watch farmers. Doctors need to listen to poets. Historians need to read fairy tales.

This cheers us up here at EAP, this general rolling up of shirtsleeves and mucking in together. All the different specialties are getting together, increasingly, to share in the really big work of developing human values: of figuring out how it’s best for all of us, together, to live.

It’s not the work of experts. They got us those two huge wars, remember? No, it’s the work of all of us, down here on the ground. It’s a big job, of course, but we’re all up to it. At least, I hope we are. The alternative, after all, isn’t to be thought of.

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In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

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