A throwback Thursday post
Someone suggested to the Bodleian Library on Twitter that they should post recordings of ambient library noises on their SoundCloud. I initially misread this as ambient literary noises, like the sound of the snow in Narnia melting… the slight tearing noise made by the Subtle Knife as it opens the way between universes… the ghosts of Christmas tenses manifesting to Scrooge…
That got me thinking about more ambient literary noises that I would like to hear.
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A Throwback Thursday post
Eco-spirituality is a new name for a set of ideas that goes back a long way.
Baruch Spinoza and Giordano Bruno both viewed the universe as divine. Their ideas were broadly pantheistic. The implications of the idea that the universe itself is divine are explored by Sam Webster, who prefers immediacy to immanence. The universe is a theophany, the manifestation of the Divine. The implication here is that everything is sacred, and we should take care of the Earth and other beings; we certainly don’t have dominion over them.
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I was researching and writing a post about Indigenous people in tech when I discovered an amazing company called Animikii and their resources about data sovereignty and resisting generative AI (thanks to this article, Celebrating Indigenous Tech).
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By Ben Valentine and Vincent Callebaut *
In the news, the state of the planet is doom and gloom: yet another species is driven to extinction, another wildfire destroys another unprepared city, and some of the strangest weather patterns break another record. Scientists and policymakers are depressed, and our collective consciousness turns to scenes of apocalypse, not narratives of recovery.
Welcome to the Anthropocene, the period in which human activity exerts a dominant influence on the Earth’s environment and climate, with terrifying results.
Alchemy was the attempt to make gold out of base metals, mostly lead. The word alchemy comes from Greek khemeioa, possibly referring to Egypt as the land of black earth, or from Greek khymatos “that which is poured out,” from khein “to pour”.
Even at the height of the quest for gold, alchemy involved the transformation of the alchemists’ soul at the same time as the substances they were working with, and metaphorical imagery abounded.
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Solarpunk is one of our touchstone ideas at Vox Clamantis Books.
Books like Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin, A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy” by Becky Chambers, The Fifth Sacred Thing and City of Refuge by Starhawk.
These are books that envision a solar powered, sustainable future. There may be dystopias over the horizon, but home is a place where handicrafts and home-made things nestle together with solar power and sustainable technology.
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A touchstone for Vox Clamantis Books is weaving and spinning.
Both weaving and spinning have been used as metaphors for storytelling. The magical qualities of weaving, and the mesmerizing effect of spinning, both lend themselves well to the concept of storytelling and narrative.
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Samizdat is one of the touchstones that inspires Vox Clamantis Books.
Samizdat was literature as resistance:
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