Just posted an introduction to master photographer William Mortensen and his dark, visionary world: ”Mortensen’s aesthetic philosophy emerged from a profound understanding of what we might call the “rhetoric of the image”—that photographs, far from being neutral documents, are elaborate texts encoded with cultural meanings, psychological projections, and ideological assumptions. His theatrical compositions, with their elaborate chiaroscuro effects and mythological subject matter, set designs and props, constituted a systematic critique of photography’s pretensions to objectivity. Where his contemporaries saw corruption of the medium’s essential nature, Mortensen perceived liberation from the tyranny of the literal.” #williammortensen #americangrotesque #feralhouse #anartapart #carlabrahamsson

Just posted my lecture about the classic occult novel The Devil’s Footprint: ”Beginning with environmental issues, Satan and his Team roam the planet setting up financing for their ambitious plans: using science to break down plastic trash in the oceans to create manure and other organic substances that will help decompose billions of human bodies placed in the deserts of Northern Africa, irrigated by appropriated and redirected oil pipes now carrying desalinated water. They also make sure the Amazon is immediately reforested. They also challenge tax-evading tech-bros to start recycling computer trash, and turn CEOs for genetic engineering companies into day-laboring farm hands, expose and extort the Vatican and its army of pedophiles, ditto with wife-beating and pecker-directed American televangelists, as well as the intelligence-challenged American president, and also Nicolo Macchiavelli as an inert institution of outdated thinking, etc etc. It basically never ends!”...

Just posted an appreciation of poet & publisher Harry Crosby: ”Such publishing was not a commercial venture, nor even a purely aesthetic one. It was a form of esotericism, a belief that certain books, if made with sufficient care, could become keys to other realms. The Black Sun Press stood against the ”massification” of literature, its books intended for the elect, the initiates, the seekers. In their pages, Crosby hoped to preserve, as in a reliquary, the possibility of transcendence.” #harrycrosby #caressecrosby #blacksunpress #modernism #occulture #anartapart #carlabrahamsson

Do you have your ticket for my new class The Legacy of Horror? ”To begin with horror, one must begin with fear. But to begin with fear is not to begin with hysteria, nor even with fright in the ordinary sense. It is to begin with a primal architecture of the human mind—something more ancient than reason, more foundational than belief. The child who fears the dark does not fear the absence of light; she fears the presence of something imagined within that darkness. The adult who recoils from a corpse does not fear the dead flesh; he fears the suggestion of mortality embodied in that stillness. Fear, in other words, is never merely reactive. It is imaginative.” #morbidanatomy #thelegacyofhorror #occulture #carlabrahamsson