“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things, of shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax, of cabbages, and kings. And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings."[i] Oh, Mr. Carroll, how prescient you were.
"Go West, young man," said Horace Greeley[ii] and sent several waves of the hopelessly romantic hurtling into the murky unknown of California’s 1850 Gold Rush. But what sends off today’s romantics? More importantly, what are the contemporary gold rushes? Everything appears to be hurtling somewhere these days – whether it’s bits of digitised data along P2P receptors, or people, scurrying between life at home and life outside. Between the beginning of the day and the end of it, everything’s fast fast fast. And what for? Where are we all trying to go?
Recently I’ve been catching myself looking at the strangest things for no good reason at all that I can think of at the time. The smallest something – a sound or a flicker of awareness (akin perhaps to L. Ron Hubbard’s hypothesis of the human engram which “contains a running record of all these perceptions: sight, sound, tactile [sic], taste, smell, organic sensation, kinetic sense, joint position, thirst record, etc.”[iii]), sometimes an odour or a fleeting sense of recall has stopped me. And in trying to latch onto that momentary sensation of something important, I’ve been formulating all sorts of odd ideas. Since there is a vast shortage of odd ideas in this jaded existence of ipods and boutique drugs and postmodern food supplements, I felt it might be nice to share some of them.
But where to start? Long time listener, first time poster. Having decided to attempt a Boswelling [iv] (possibly a Custering) of everyday weird stuff, where does one begin? I believe inspiration may be sought in the vine although only Australian vines since an old Breton proverb warns me “God knows what will happen to women who drink wine, girls that speak old languages, and suns that set too early.”
Mmm. Sun's going down. Make mine a Shiraz, garçon.
References:
"Go West, young man," said Horace Greeley[ii] and sent several waves of the hopelessly romantic hurtling into the murky unknown of California’s 1850 Gold Rush. But what sends off today’s romantics? More importantly, what are the contemporary gold rushes? Everything appears to be hurtling somewhere these days – whether it’s bits of digitised data along P2P receptors, or people, scurrying between life at home and life outside. Between the beginning of the day and the end of it, everything’s fast fast fast. And what for? Where are we all trying to go?
Recently I’ve been catching myself looking at the strangest things for no good reason at all that I can think of at the time. The smallest something – a sound or a flicker of awareness (akin perhaps to L. Ron Hubbard’s hypothesis of the human engram which “contains a running record of all these perceptions: sight, sound, tactile [sic], taste, smell, organic sensation, kinetic sense, joint position, thirst record, etc.”[iii]), sometimes an odour or a fleeting sense of recall has stopped me. And in trying to latch onto that momentary sensation of something important, I’ve been formulating all sorts of odd ideas. Since there is a vast shortage of odd ideas in this jaded existence of ipods and boutique drugs and postmodern food supplements, I felt it might be nice to share some of them.
But where to start? Long time listener, first time poster. Having decided to attempt a Boswelling [iv] (possibly a Custering) of everyday weird stuff, where does one begin? I believe inspiration may be sought in the vine although only Australian vines since an old Breton proverb warns me “God knows what will happen to women who drink wine, girls that speak old languages, and suns that set too early.”
Mmm. Sun's going down. Make mine a Shiraz, garçon.
References:
original illustration by John Tenniel, 1871
[i] Lewis Carroll, "The Walrus and The Carpenter" from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872).
[ii] Horace Greeley is usually credited with this phrase but it belonged to John B. L. Soule and first appeared in 1851 in the Terre Haute Express. It is usually quoted only in part, the full phrase being: "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country."
[iii] An Experimental Investigation of Hubbard's Engram Hypothesis (Dianetics) by Jack Fox, Alvin E. Davis, and B Lebovit Psychological Newsletter, 1959, 10 131-134.
[iv] "[James Boswell] is, and he will remain, an astonishing person. His predilection for romantic disguises, his readiness to assume gravely the most unexpected characters, his rippling good nature, his extravagance and folly and weakness, his odd piety, his awful glooms, his alternations of revelry and solemnity..." C. E. Vulliamy, James Boswell, 1932 biography (CVJB, p. 1).
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