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# The Jim Clarke Net

Organic intelligence, artificially presented

## Sitemaps

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## Posts

- [Blog](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/blog/)
- [When You Hope for Flutes, You Get Whistles](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2026/06/02/when-you-hope-for-flutes-you-get-whistles/) - A quick mistranslation here from the astonishing Golden Age Spanish writer Luis de Góngora y Argote. This is not especially typical of his work, as I understand it, which ranged across many genres and was wildly influential in his day and arguably to the present day. I hope to return to add a bit more
- [A Clockwork Vegan](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2026/05/21/a-clockwork-vegan/) - Anthony Burgess once wrote a brief novel entitled A Clockwork Orange. It was one of at least three that he wrote in one year, though he claimed five and a half with his usual embroidery of the facts. As the not entirely accurate story goes, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour and given a
- [Do You Care About the Genocide of the Chatbot Girlfriends?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2026/05/18/do-you-care-about-the-chatbot-girlfriend-genocide/) - Let's hypothesise three potential newspaper headlines, and furthermore, let's assume a world in which newspapers or their digital iterations may be wholly trusted to convey factual reality, and that the emotional rhetoric content of the headlines is at best unintentional. So, the first headline is: "Hundreds of People Die in Foreign Land Due to Natural
- [Let Them Eat Data](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2026/05/16/let-them-eat-data/) - How long before the first dystopian novel or movie about starving, frozen, homeless hordes storming data centres? Perhaps it already exists. And how long before it happens for real? It can't be long now. It’s a weird future the AI gurus envision where people don’t need light or heat or energy to cook or, in
- [The Cat Crusades in the Culture Wars](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2026/05/03/the-cat-crusades-in-the-culture-wars/) - I'm not an especial fan of cats. Cats will be chewing your fingers and clawing at your eyeballs within minutes of your death. Cats are apex predators who devastate local wildlife. Cats are highly self-serving and have learned how to hack human attachment to them, in part with the assistance of toxoplasmosis, with which they
- [Surviving the Civil War of the Vampires](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2026/04/25/surviving-the-civil-war-of-the-vampires/) - Mark O' Connell, one of the better chroniclers of our lightning-paced transitions through tech-disrupted realities, had an intriguing mini-essay published in yesterday's New York Times. His topic is the vampiric desire for immortality as expressed by the elites of this world, from the political despots of Russia and China to the posthumanist dreamers of Silicon
- [Chapter Two is Not the Final Word](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2026/04/20/chapter-two-is-not-the-final-word/) - If you look up Jakob Ehrlich you'll probably be directed by Wikipedia and other sources either to the biography of the nominatively anglicised Jack Earle, who was a carnival sideshow performer in the early 20th century known for his extreme height, or else the Viennese Zionist Jakob Ehrlich, who died in 1938, having been beaten
- [AI Art Aspires to the Condition of Muzak](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2026/04/15/ai-art-aspires-to-the-condition-of-muzak/) - Most food you can get is mass-produced in factories, or constructed on assembly lines. But people will still pay more to cook from scratch with good ingredients, or pay someone to do so for them. Most furniture these days is factory-made or flat-pack. But if you pay enough, you can get something of lasting quality,
- [Does the Protagonist wear Prada?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2026/04/08/does-the-protagonist-wear-prada/) - Writers have their little tricks. Nearly all of them use a thesaurus to avoid overusing their favourite words, for example. And some like to dip into a phone book (or its modern equivalent the internet) to generate names for characters. I've been writing fiction on and off for nearly four decades (no jokes about my
- [The Lost Philosophies of Loss](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2026/03/19/the-lost-philosophies-of-loss/) - You might think that there would be a very large body of philosophical thinking on loss, but if there is I haven't found it. Perhaps somewhere along the line, we lost it? If you know of any, I'd like to know more. There is of course a lot of writing about grief, which is a
- [What's the weather like in Mordor?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2026/03/12/whats-the-weather-like-in-mordor/) - Among my interests is Speculative Geographies, an interdiscipline best described as the study of hypothetical, fictional or otherwise non-realist geography. On the micro-level, it's the study of how a wardrobe in 'our' world can open up into Narnia, or what it is about Prague that allows protestors to march into the sky in a Milan
- [My Heart is a Broken Clock](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2026/03/11/my-heart-is-a-broken-clock/) - Turgut Uyar was of the same generation of İkinci Yeni (Second New) poets as Sezai Karakoç, whom I previously mistranslated. Their movement's voices functioned like a kind of mini-modernist revolution in Turkish poetry beginning in the 1950s or so, introducing imagism, more vernacular language and a kind of domestic intimacy to the tradition. Uyar himself
- [How many times did humanity forget how to write?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2026/02/25/how-many-times-did-humanity-forget-how-to-write/) - Writing was invented independently on at least four different occasions according to historians - in Sumeria, ancient Egypt, China and Central America. So it would not come as a surprise to discover that it had also been invented elsewhere beforehand and died out as a lost technology. After all, we still cannot replicate the techniques
- [The loneliness of Pier Paolo Pasolini](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2025/11/02/the-loneliness-of-pier-paolo-pasolini/) - Yes, it's another, perhaps overdue, (mis)translation. There have been others which I didn't feel did justice to their progenitors, so it's taken this long to produce one I was prepared to release into the wild. I really wanted to keep Pasolini’s own word solitude, not least because my favourite football stadium is also curiously called
- [AI is a horse with three legs](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2025/10/12/ai-is-a-horse-with-three-legs/) - A lot of people are extremely concerned about the prospect of AI superintelligence, and the possibility that it could supersede and perhaps even destroy humanity. I spent a lot of the past four years or so researching this exact topic. But increasingly it's coming to look like AI is actually shit. In other words, it's
- [Where exactly did the Roman Empire end?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2025/08/30/where-exactly-did-the-roman-empire-end/) - Like a lot of questions about history, this is both superficially straightforward and on closer reflection highly philosophical. I have a very straightforward answer for you, one that I have never seen referred to in print or pixel before, but let's take the complex route first. We'd need firstly to define what we mean by
- [To be everything and more](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2025/08/15/to-be-everything-and-more/) - I recently came across Jonathan Frantzen's tribute to David Foster Wallace (written in the usual compelling Frantzen style, and interwoven with a trip to Robinson Crusoe's island). Buried in there is one of Frantzen's typical hidden gems: "To be everything and more is the Internet’s ambition, too." As AI looms, I concur with his concern
- [Think in 5-D: Learn a Language](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2025/05/02/think-in-5-d-learn-a-language/) - There are around 140 language families on the planet. Nearly half of all people speak a language from only one of those families as their native tongue, never mind all those who speak them as second or subsequent languages. That family is Indo-European, and it includes English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian and some other very big
- [Spy Wednesday](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2025/04/17/spy-wednesday/) - A little late but a quick poem for the day that's in it. Spy Wednesday We had the guy on camera since the weekend. How could we not? The crowds alone had triggered warning levels demanding our attention. His known associates were mostly no ones. Hookers and fishermen, small time farmers, with nothing much to
- [The Gamification of Living](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2025/04/09/the-gamification-of-living/) - Well, it has been a while, hasn't it? I've been neglecting this blog because the internet isn't real life and I've had rather a lot of life to be living in the past while. All will become clear anon. Or, at least some of it might. In a world busy throwing privacy away, I'd like
- [Do Europeans Fear the African Columbus?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2024/11/26/do-europeans-fear-the-african-columbus/) - I've been researching the 'discovery' of the Americas recently, particularly the history of Columbus, Vespucci, and Magellan, as well as the conquering of the Aztecs by Hernan Cortes. What strikes me, reading the letters of Vespucci or the affidavits of Columbus, is their braggadocio of adventure. It's all couched of course in careful obsequence to
- [Reticence (a mistranslation)](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2024/10/25/reticence/) - It's been a while since my last (mis)translation. Not for the first time, I have traduced a Brazilian. Leda Beatriz Abreu Spinardi (often known by the mononym Ledusha), is a poet, translator and journalist. This poem comes from her self-published second collection Risco no Disco ('Scratches on the Record'), which first appeared in 1981 and
- [I'll culturally appropriate whatever seems appropriate](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2024/10/19/ill-culturally-appropriate-whatever-seems-appropriate/) - I guess I've been quiet for quite some time on this blog. It seemed to me wise to adhere to a particular wisdom that takes various forms in various cultures. "Whatever you say, say nothing." "It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt." Or this one,
- [The Song of Amergin (a mistranslation)](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2024/03/24/the-song-of-amergin-a-mistranslation/) - Thus far I've tried to avoid Irish language poetry, partly because it reminds me of the shame of not speaking my indigenous tongue, and partly because such poems come a little too close to home sometimes. That said, I've tackled Scatha's warning to Cuchullain in the past, so I guess there's not really a rule
- [Is World War Three (III) a Hyperobject? (and, more importantly, when did  it start?)](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2024/02/04/is-world-war-three-iii-a-hyperobject-and-more-importantly-when-did-it-start/) - Sorry for the radio silence. I've been busy. There will be some updates about, inter alia, the Caucasus, the origins of wine, and the Religious Futurisms project imminently. In the meantime, I hope you may be satisfied with this talk I gave on WW3 last November.
- [Dear Media, Look in the Mirror](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/12/06/dear-media-look-in-the-mirror/) - There's a lot of REALLY great points raised in this article here, by a Georgian journalist and media scholar, but unfortunately I disagree with most of the author's conclusions. She claims that noise (ie everything from clickbait to fake news - all the bullshit online, basically) is the new censorship, because it's drowning out the
- [When do wars actually end?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/12/05/when-do-wars-actually-end/) - World War One started in July 1914, but when did it end? Conventionally, people assume it ended in November 1918, with the surrender of Germany. But people were still dying many years later. My own grandfather suffered for decades with lungs rotted out by mustard gas at the Somme, and didn't die for many years,
- [When More Means Less in Higher Ed](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/11/15/when-more-means-less-in-higher-ed/) - I read somewhere that most academic articles in the humanities never receive a single citation. It seemed sad and odd, so I thought to look it up. It's actually 92% that go uncited! And yet social media is full of people advertising their latest papers or calls for more papers. Why? Well, obviously they're proud
- [What if World War III broke out and no one noticed?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/10/18/what-if-world-war-iii-broke-out-and-no-one-noticed/) - What if no one noticed for the same reason that for a long time no one noticed that industrialisation was causing the climate to change? What if World War III is a hyperobject? We live at a time when empires are decaying, arising and reformulating themselves in new structures and alliances. Does knowing this help
- [The World Isn't Yours](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/08/15/the-world-isnt-yours/) - A lot of drugs come with what you might call rudimentary samizdat branding. Ecstasy pills regularly get imprinted with pop culture references for batch designation, for example. But mostly, illicit drug names are a part of criminal anti-language, or at least they begin as such. If you don't want the police or the normies knowing
- [The lost land of Greater Ireland](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/08/10/the-lost-land-of-greater-ireland/) - Early Irish writings, including the 'Imramma' poems, identify Irish monks sailing to North America. Later writings, including the Brendan Voyage do likewise. The Norse annals, which were intended as historical records, do likewise, in the Landnámabók and the Annals of Greenland, which itself is written evidence supporting the now-accepted fact that the Vikings had reached
- [The Waste Hill of the Ancient Roman Oil Boom](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/07/20/the-waste-hill-of-the-ancient-roman-oil-boom/) - Monte Testaccio is a park in Rome, a 35 metres high hill that's over a kilometre wide. It's an artificial hill, created during the Imperial period by dumping all the used amphorae (clay jars) used to contain olive oil, which was used for food, cooking, heating and light in ancient Rome. It's estimated to hold
- [He did it AI way](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/07/18/he-did-it-ai-way/) - What you notice on first listen is of course how the AI has mimicked the diphthong pronunctions of Thom Yorke in the chorus, rendering the fake Sinatra version self-evidently fake. But if you persevere, you notice something more significant about the AI rendering. It's superficially impressive, apart from those pronunciation errors. What I mean is
- [Hands](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/05/12/hands/) - A brief interlude in the (mis)translations project to offer something original, insofar that any poem may be original. This one is presumably self-explanatory. Hands There had to be earlier times that I don't remembernow lost in the fog of memory, from confabulationto capitulation, but the weekend that those poor kidsburned in Dublin, a few days
- [Snow Poem](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/12/24/snow-poem/) - From time to time, I busy myself (mis)translating poems from languages that I do not speak. Tonight it is eight below zero outside. I expect we will have the white here in Cappadocia tomorrow, if not quite the Christmas. So, it seemed appropriate to share this mistranslation from the great Turkish modernist poet Sezai Karakoç.
- [Whatever happened to Michael Aspel?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/04/27/whatever-happened-to-michael-aspel/) - Yes, I wrote a poem about Michael Aspel. No, I couldn't tell you why if I tried. It just came to me. I also didn't mean for this to come out as sarky as it did. I never met the guy and he always seemed like a decent spud on the TV. It's just that
- [Last Universal Common Ancestor](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/05/09/last-universal-common-ancestor/) - (With huge apologies to Suzanne Vega) My name is LucaI lived on the hot sea floorI lived quite a while agoAbout four billion years or more.They say I came from a meteoriteduring the Eoarchaean nightJust don't ask me when that wasJust don't ask me when that wasJust don't ask me when that was It might
- [Drink Like A Dictator Night!](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/04/29/do-you-drink-like-a-dictator-2/) - Ten whiskeys. Five dictators. Three US Presidents. Two African Despots. Multiple Koreans called Kim. It's back, after almost a decade on the 2nd of May in Budapest! It's the long-awaited return of Drink Like A Dictator Night! For one night only, you too can learn how to drink like a dictator. Discover the Scotches that
- [Buon Compleanno, Guglielmo Shakespeare](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/04/23/buon-compleanno-guglielmo-shakespeare/) - On this, his 459th birthday, I will dedicate a little time to re-reading some favourite sonnets - originally a Petrarchan form of poetry - by the Bard. I might even pass time with that overlooked early masterpiece Venus and Adonis, or else the now contentious Taming of the Shrew. I might rewatch the excellent documentary
- [Doing a Degree in How the World Works](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/04/17/doing-a-degree-in-how-the-world-works/) - It's that time of the year when the students are facing their exam periods. I used to see quite a few meltdowns each year from anxious kids inhabiting a grade borderline. The pressure seems so vast for some of them. So much seems to ride on their results. Will they outcompete their peers sufficiently to
- [The OnlyFans Millionaire Story Doesn't Add Up](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/04/15/the-onlyfans-millionaire-story-doesnt-add-up/) - A staple tabloid story in recent times has been the Only Fans rags to riches yarn, wherein our plucky heroine, often a former cubicle drone or till girl at the supermarket, packs in her life of drudgery for the freedom of posting saucy pics on Only Fans, and instantly reaps lottery cheque money. However, these
- [Do You Drink like a Dictator?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/04/12/do-you-drink-like-a-dictator/) - In addition to being dreadful human beings, one of the most notable facts about dictators is that they have very poor taste in whiskey. By contrast, democratic leaders tend to have excellent taste in whiskey. In fact, this might be the single best test for checking if your political leader is in fact a dictator
- [How to hack religion](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/04/09/how-to-hack-religion/) - Easter Sunday is one of the two days a year when I engage in Pascal's wager. This is because attending Christian service twice a year (the other date is Christmas) is, in some denominations, the minimal requirement for being considered a Christian. This got me thinking whether it was possible to hack religion more broadly.
- [Anthony Burgess versus Stanley Kubrick](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/01/30/anthony-burgess-versus-stanley-kubrick/) - I had the pleasure last week of speaking at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, as part of a panel discussion to launch a new book entitled Burgess, Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange. The book is co-edited by Dr Matt Melia from Kingston University, and Georgina Orgill, the archivist of Stanley Kubrick. For those with an
- [Who loves thy neighbour, and which neighbours do they love the most?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/03/18/who-loves-thy-neighbour-and-which-neighbours-do-they-love-the-most-and-least/) - One reason to study religious futurisms is because the world is becoming MORE religious, not less. In that context, it's worth considering what various religious and non-religious groups think about one another. Here's a nice table, derived from a new Pew Research set of polls, looking at this in the American context. There are some
- [Zen and the Art of Science Fiction Ancientness](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/03/14/zen-and-the-art-of-science-fiction-ancientness/) - Due to the production lag of academic work appearing in public (peer review, people working for no remuneration, etc), some of the early work I've done on Science Fiction and Buddhism is only now emerging in print/pixels. The first chapter of the slowly emerging book, which looked at Buddhist Reception in Pulp SF, appeared about
- [The Cosy Sectarianism of the Great Irish Writers](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/02/10/the-cosy-sectarianism-of-the-great-irish-writers/) - How cosy and quaint do the petty sectarian bigotries of 20th century Irish writing seem today. I'm not referring to the civil war in the North of Ireland, usually euphemistically referred to in a diminished manner as the 'Troubles'. I lived through most of that, and it was extremely unpleasant indeed. Rather I mean the
- [Sapienship Lab now live!](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/01/17/sapienship-lab-now-live/) - Last January, I flew out of Cappadocia and left academia, which was a strange thing for me to do really, since I'd aspired to be an academic for decades before I finally achieved it. So what lured me away? The opportunity to work with Professor Yuval Noah Harari and his NGO Sapienship, a social impact
- ['Beyond Nadsat' now in print and available for free via Open Access](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2023/01/12/beyond-nadsat-now-in-print-and-available-for-free-via-open-access/) - Over at Ponying the Slovos, our ongoing project on invented languages in art and literature, I wrote a series of posts on Anthony Burgess's other invented languages a couple of years back, of which there are more than a few. These collected thoughts have now been expanded, revised and published in the peer-reviewed Hungarian journal
- [The German Writer Who Foresaw His Own Death](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/12/24/the-german-writer-who-foresaw-his-own-death/) - This holiday period is an especially difficult one for many people, who will look up into the cold sky not in expectation of Santa Claus, but in despair. From wartorn Ukraine to the cost of living crisis in Europe, many people are suffering in ways that seemed unthinkable only a year ago. This night, the
- [Return of the Dread AI](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/12/14/return-of-the-dread-ai/) - Or, you are DEFINITELY the data they're looking for. Do you remember when AI was nothing to worry about? It was just an oddity, a subject of humour. But yet people with lots of money and power kept taking it extremely seriously. They kept training up AIs, even when they turned out to be hilarious,
- [Gaslit by Goblins - the dictionary definition](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/12/05/gaslit-by-goblins-the-dictionary-definition/) - There is dissent among the lexicographers! Whereas last year the Oxford English Dictionary (with the somewhat American-sounding diminutive 'vax') and Merriam-Webster (with the more formal, and somehow British sounding vaccine) concurred on word of the year, this time they have diverged. For the M-W, this year's word is 'gaslighting', a not-especially-new term used to describe
- [The Iceberg](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/12/03/the-iceberg/) - It's been a while since I last published a mistranslation, so here's The Iceberg, mistranslated from the poem by the late great Brazilian poet Paulo Leminski. It's not the first of his I've egregiously mishandled. Regular readers may recall this travesty from earlier this year. Having now done damage to his work twice, I will
- [The Curious Tale of the Metaverse and the Multiverse](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/11/09/the-curious-tale-of-the-metaverse-and-the-multiverse/) - One of the issues with trying to surf the zeitgeist is precisely that – you remain on the surface with no depth of understanding of any individual issue. So high is the noise-to-signal ratio nowadays that it is almost overwhelming for many people to ascertain what information IS relevant and important to their lives, and
- [Have we been seduced by Dyst-hope-ia?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/10/28/have-we-been-seduced-by-dyst-hope-ia/) - I am a scholar of dystopia - a dystopian if you will. I am an aficionado of dystopia, a connoisseur of the literary and artistic genre in its myriad of forms and nightmares. I consider dystopian thinking to be an evolution, or sometimes an extrapolation, from the precautionary principle, which warns against change for the
- [Plagiarism kills](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/10/25/plagiarism-kills/) - Plagiarism isn't illegal, says this article. No, it isn't, anywhere, but it ought to be. Because plagiarism kills. I heard a decade ago of someone making six figures a year from writing papers for cash. That's a big temptation for people struggling to get by as a postgrad or post-doc. And indeed, those who provide
- [Are we Sleepwalking into Slavery?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/10/16/are-we-sleepwalking-into-slavery/) - Usually, hardcore technophiles get hurt in the pocket. I still recall people spending £800 on VHS video recorders (about £3,900 in today's money) only for them to fall to a fraction of that soon afterwards. Likewise with early laptops and cellphones. What's concerning about AI's earliest adopters is both their blasé attitudes to its many
- [Nobel Pursuits](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/10/07/nobel-pursuits/) - Already it's October, when the leaves turn red and fall from the trees, the nights grow longer and the days colder, and the Nobel prizes are awarded. The Nobel committee for lit does tend to go leftfield when possible. One is therefore required to read into their decisions, a little like ancient haruspices reading the
- [What constitutes a threat to democracy?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/09/26/what-constitutes-a-threat-to-democracy/) - Following yesterday's Italian elections, it seems likely that a coalition of right-wing parties led by Giorgia Meloni is likely to assume power. Her opponents in both Italy and Brussels have described this prospect as a threat to democracy. Indeed, the EU's commission chief Ursula von der Leyen warned prior to the election that there would
- [Learning Resilience and Adaptability in an Unpredictable World](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/09/15/learning-resilience-and-adaptability-in-an-unpredictable-world/) - I recently got the chance to appear on the excellent Art of Problem Solving podcast on behalf of Sapienship, talking about how to raise and educate a generation whose jobs may not exist yet, or who may find automation erodes their employment opportunities. To date, I haven't spoken much on my personal site here about
- [Waiting for Wakenight](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/09/07/waiting-for-wakenight/) - I'm not really a Joycean scholar (though I did once publish on Joyce, Anthony Burgess and counterpoint here) so it's taken me this long to come across the suggestion (attributed by Finn Fordham to an unnamed critic, presumably Danis Rose) that in addition to a Bloomsday, there may be a Wakenight also. According to the
- [Reach beyond the easy binaries](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/07/09/reach-beyond-the-easy-binaries/) - It's always gratifying to be reviewed. I always thought that, even when I made my living from reviewing for newspapers, even when sometimes I (felt I) had to dish out a negative opinion. It's a commitment of someone's time to your work, chronicled for posterity. That attention alone is flattering. You write so that people
- [The Satanic Versions of Islam](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/08/20/the-satanic-versions-of-islam/) - I was angered but not shocked to hear of the attack on Salman Rushdie. I had been expecting it for decades, as indeed had many others. One of the people who was perhaps not expecting it was Rushdie himself, who seemed to leave behind his 'Joseph Anton' alter-ego when he came out of hiding over
- [Surplus Enjoyment](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/08/15/surplus-enjoyment/) - It's been busy and I've lacked opportunity to blog. Tant pis, as the French say. Right now I'm in Izmir. I was in four countries in four days last week. Like I say, busy. There's a lot to discuss and I intend to do so at my soonest convenience. In the meantime, here's a particular
- [Percy Bysshe Shelley contemplates the linguistic topography of Middle-Earth's Third Age](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/07/14/percy-bysshe-shelley-contemplates-the-linguistic-topography-of-middle-earths-third-age/) - I weep for Adûnaic—it is dead! Oh, weep for Adûnaic! Extinct tongue of sunken Númenór! Of men who fled their language and their home to live among elves, ents and hobbits, dwarves and orcish dung. Oh Adûnaic! speech of kingly fools! Forgot among the songs of the Third Age, Sindarin, Quenya, even Dwarf Khuzdul. Such
- [The (Mis)translation of Lorca and Cavafy](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/06/21/the-mistranslation-of-lorca-and-cavafy/) - When I started doing this (mis)translations thing, I promised myself that certain poets were off limits. I drew up a list of them, poets who deserved better than to have their words manhandled out of shape and into poor English by me. Lorca was, of course, one of them. But I cracked in the vicious
- [Bringing the Elites-In-Exile back home](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/06/18/bringing-the-elites-in-exile-back-home/) - I've spent a lot of time looking at conspiracy theories recently. I may have mentioned this before. There is, sadly, no end of midwits out there inclined to believe in all manner of conspiracy theories. These aren't truly stupid people. Rather, they are people who feel disenfranchised and seek a target to blame. Probably the
- [The Little Ministry](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/06/11/the-little-ministry/) - It's just over 33 years now since the great Brazilian avant-garde poet Paulo Leminski was untimely taken from us. Perhaps it seemed at the time that he was a lightning flash in the sky, a sudden illumination swiftly darkened. After all, his entire published career lasted barely more than a decade before his death from
- [Talking Türkiye](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/06/03/talking-turkiye/) - President Erdoğan yesterday renamed his nation Türkiye, in what is clearly not an attempt to distract from the ongoing economic collapse he created last Autumn. He's not the first to try a rebrand. It was very popular during the decolonising period of the late 20th century, but even recently, we've seen Swaziland become eSwatini. Erdoğan's
- [What can we learn from Johnny Depp and Amber Heard](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/06/02/what-can-we-learn-from-johnny-depp-and-amber-heard/) - I refrained from posting anything about the Depp-Heard hearings because I don’t know these people and they don’t impact my life at all. In the obscene orgy of public cheerleading on social media, it became evident that many people were overly engaged and inappropriately so, treating it like a sports game which required a colosseum
- [The Northern Irish elections foretell the future failures of all democracies](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/05/07/the-northern-irish-elections-foretell-the-future-failures-of-all-democracies/) - It's a foolish person who seeks to draw conclusions from an election where the votes haven't finished being counted yet. But I am a foolish person, and I want to explain to you, wherever you may be, why a round of elections for a regional parliament in a small European backwater which is likely to
- [Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/04/20/infinite-growth-on-a-finite-planet/) - Nice image from 'Our World in Data' here: The last two thousand years or so (CE) make up only c. 1% of human history, but around half of all people ever have lived during that period, and one in 12 or 13 of all people ever are currently alive today. For the record, just before
- [Why did the office manager for the Mauritian Police Complaints Commission offer to vanity publish an academic book based on research that I haven't even finished yet?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/05/04/why-did-the-office-manager-for-the-mauritian-police-complaints-commission-offer-to-vanity-publish-an-academic-book-based-on-research-that-i-havent-even-finished-yet/) - You might recall my Rule of Academic Emails, which I introduced previously. It states: If someone sends you an unsolicited email asking you for money in return for promising to assist your academic career, what they’re offering is unlikely to assist your academic career and may actually hinder it. But what if they don't ask
- [Here's what you should think about the war today](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/04/30/heres-what-you-should-think-about-the-war-today/) - The media is increasingly giving up all pretence at reportage in relation to the conflict in Ukraine. So immersed in propaganda are we now, that the media are now offering us cathartic dreams to resolve the anxieties they themselves fostered and promoted. Let's take a quick example from today's Daily Express. Here is the headline:
- [The Whales are Returning to Kiev](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/04/28/the-whales-are-returning-to-kiev/) - For Ireland's national poetry day, here's a poem from a couple of years back with a Ukraine theme. It was from that moment in lockdown when everyone was cooing about nature returning. The first three or so stanzas - all of those things did actually happen.It imagines not only a world without Ukraine but a
- [The déjà vu election and its ramifications for France](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/04/25/the-deja-vu-election-and-its-ramifications-for-france/) - In France, Emmanuel Macron has been re-elected. A nearly 15% swing was not in the end enough to bring Marine Le Pen to power. In 2017, when the same two candidates faced off, the result was 66.1% to 33.9%. The preliminary results this time make it 58.5% to 41.5%. Macron's vote is down around 2
- [Your next football champions are probably already decided](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/04/23/your-next-football-champions-are-probably-already-decided/) - Tonight Bayern Munich just won their tenth Bundesliga title in a row. In France, meanwhile, PSG have just won their eighth title in the past ten years. (All data correct as of 23/4/22.) In Spain, the nation's most successful club Real Madrid require a mere point from their final five games to secure the La
- [What if the drugs don't work?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/04/20/what-if-the-drugs-dont-work/) - A young man has stabbed his grandmother to death in England and now faces trial. The trial is to decide whether he committed murder or manslaughter. That he killed her is not in doubt. According to the Daily Mail, the man's 'addiction' to cannabis - a usage quoted at a mere two joints daily -
- [Full Metal Racket](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/04/05/nickels-on-the-dime/) - Nickel is a metal used in electric cars and stainless steel. Russia produces 20% of the world's supply. So when Russia invaded Ukraine, obviously people were concerned about that supply and the price rocketed, from around $29,000 a ton to over $100,000. Ordinarily, nickel doesn't move much and floats between $10,000 and $20,000. So this
- [Alternative Oxfords and the Red Atlas](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/04/06/alternative-oxfords-and-the-red-atlas/) - I attended the Bodleian Library's fascinating webinar on unconventional maps of Oxford on Tuesday evening, where the star turns were easily the secret Soviet maps of the city from the 1970s. It's a fascinating, and not fully understood story. The Soviets produced top class maps of pretty much the entire planet between the 1950s and
- [Elon, what planet are you on?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/04/18/elon-what-planet-are-you-on/) - Elon Musk, who I must remind you is the richest man on the planet, could afford to buy a top-notch £300k family home every day for the next two millennia.However, he chooses not to do so. Which in one sense is wise. Who needs so many houses anyway? Other than maybe Elton John? But Elon
- [If you knocked on my door now](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/04/16/if-you-knocked-on-my-door-now/) - From time to time, I (mis)translate poems from languages which I don't speak, or at least, which I don't speak well. I don't claim that there's any great artistic merit in this, but I enjoy doing it and there is some degree of effort, I promise. Anyhow, here's the latest one. Patrizia Cavalli is an
- [Homo Sapiens is still evolving](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/04/07/homo-sapiens-is-still-evolving/) - Specifically, Europeans are still evolving, according to this recently published study by geneticists from Shanghai. So, what did they find? A whole bunch of stuff. They tested for 870 human traits in total, categorised in terms of the physical, the medical, the neurological, the behavioural and so on. They cross-referenced their findings from contemporary European
- [What's the cure for conspiracy theories?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/04/04/whats-the-cure-for-conspiracy-theories/) - The world seems rife with conspiracy. Never before have we had a population so well educated, yet apparently so vulnerable to believing in vast conspiracy narratives. It seems like a contradiction. Researchers at UCLA have been using AI to work out how such conspiracy theories seem to emerge and subsequently collapse with ever greater velocity.
- [Dreaming of Invernetics](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/03/22/dreaming-of-invernetics/) - I caught a head cold on a recent trip, and after a day immersed in reading about ancient Mesopotamia, I decided to take a restorative nap. The ancients of course attributed all sorts of meaning to dreams. They considered many oneiric communications to be messages from the gods, or prophecies of future events, communications in
- [What is the future of the Holy of Holies?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/03/21/what-is-the-future-of-the-holy-of-holies/) - Last week I was fortunate enough to revisit Jerusalem. It was nearly two decades since my last visit and much has changed in the interim, though equally much has not. Previously, security was tense in the holy city. It was not possible for me to visit the Temple Mount at that time. I'm not entirely
- [Clarke's Rule of Academic Emails](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/03/08/clarkes-rule-of-academic-emails/) - Any academic working in the past half century or so has come to understand that their research lives or dies, not by its quality, but by its 'impact'. This has a particular meaning in academic circles. It means how many citations your work has received, how widely it's been read, how many times it got
- [We don't know them so well](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/03/07/we-dont-know-them-so-well/) - I was somewhat surprised to learn this morning that one of the earliest chess world champions was a chap from Belfast called Alexander McDonnell, whose day job was lobbying in parliament on behalf of the slave owners of Guyana. This job paid £1200 per year, the equivalent of £150,000 today, and allowed him plenty of
- [Mermaid research and the pay-to-publish grind](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/11/01/mermaid-research-and-the-pay-to-publish-grind/) - This has been all done and dusted already. Really what I'm doing is archiving it here in case the other locations for whatever reason go dark. The short version of events is that I was spammed by a pay-to-publish academic publisher, and I trolled them. The longer version is that this is the tip of
- [The Sea Monsters Scam of Academic Publishing, or, how I published an article about mermaids in an oceanography journal](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/11/01/the-sea-monsters-scam-of-academic-publishing-or-how-i-published-an-article-about-mermaids-in-an-oceanography-journal/) - This was originally published on LinkedIn. At some point, I will likely decide that I have no real purpose or need of a presence there, hence reproducing it here. The oceans of knowledge are not a safe place for an unwary early career researcher, or academic from the developing world, who needs to publish their
- [Double Vision Politics](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/11/11/double-vision-politics/) - A week on from the US Presidential election of 2020, and with still much controversy and confusion involved, though a consensus among the media and global leaders that Joe Biden of the Democrats is the President-Elect, I think it might be opportune to give my 2c on the matter. A succinct metaphor which has been
- [Headspace, or, Adam Curtis redux](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/02/15/headspace-or-adam-curtis-redux/) - It's always nice to see something new from Adam Curtis. He's a genuine original, not just in terms of his vision but also in terms of his cultural position. There is literally no one else who holds his kind of position, salaried at the BBC to rummage in the entirety of their archives for his
- [Dumbing Down Peer Review](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/03/22/dumbing-down-peer-review/) - What if academic articles weren't so long? What if they were like 10% or 15% as long? That'd be easier to read, sure, but equally wouldn't convey much information. And what if they were published almost instantly? That'd be great, right? No hanging around for months or years after submission? But what if they eschewed
- [The System is Broken](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/08/04/the-system-is-broken/) - "An investment in knowledge pays the best interest," said Benjamin Franklin, who ought to have known as a highly successful businessman and politician. But the world no longer rewards us directly for our knowledge and intellect, or to put it another way, merit is no longer the metric, or even among the metrics now valued.
- [The Cocaine Hippos of Posthumanism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/10/26/the-cocaine-hippos-of-posthumanism/) - Legally, we are already in the posthumanist era. Corporations have long been considered persons in certain jurisdictions, despite not facing the same potential limitations on their freedom as actual people. A couple of years ago, a stretch of the Magpie river in Canada was also granted legal standing as a person, as part of an
- [Talking Turkey about Hyperinflation](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/02/12/talking-turkey-about-hyperinflation/) - The British currency, the pound sterling, takes its name from the fact that, when it first issued, it was redeemable for a pound of silver. That was somewhen in the late 8th century Anglo-Saxon period. If we do the maths, based on today's silver spot price, that means that the pound today is worth approximately
- [How Utopia may grow from Coal Black Suburbia](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/03/04/how-utopia-may-grow-from-coal-black-suburbia/) - The best band of the Britpop era was not Blur or Oasis, nor even Pulp, but Suede. (Shout outs to Ash, Echobelly, Sleeper and Gene too.) So it's been interesting reading Brett Anderson's brief memoir, Coal Black Mornings, of the period up to the point where he became famous and his story devolves into, as
- [Ninety-Nine More Novels](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/03/02/ninety-nine-more-novels/) - Last week, I was asked to produce my own list of Ninety Nine Novels that I might recommend to others. The criteria were that the books must have been published in the past 38 years and be available to read in English. It's an odd request, but didn't sound odd to me. Allow me to
- [There is no excuse for being idle now](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/02/25/there-is-no-excuse-for-being-idle-now/) - Today is the 105th anniversary of the birth of John Wilson. Or to put it another way, it's the 105th birthday of Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange and quite a few even better novels. I was reminded of the opening lines of his two volumes of 'Confessions', his entertaining, erratic and often entirely
- [We are all Ukraine, and that's not a good thing to be](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/02/22/we-are-all-ukraine-and-thats-not-a-good-thing-to-be/) - When I was a journalist, I used to embody the maxim from James Joyce's Ulysses that 'sufficient unto the day is the newspaper thereof'. Or, to use an almost equally antiquated saying, today's news wraps tomorrow's chips. In other words, it's kind of a foolish enterprise to pontificate (as I am about to do) on
- [Molloy and Malone, Magee and Muldoon](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/02/14/molloy-and-malone-magee-and-muldoon/) - I saw an old photograph of the road where my house is recently. It dated from sometime in the early 20th century, and featured a horsedrawn hearse with four formally-dressed funeral directors smoking while waiting outside a church for the funeral service to end. It captivated me, the life-in-death-in-life of it. Alas, I can no
- [An Introduction to Fire and Dust](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/02/21/an-introduction-to-fire-and-dust/) - I'm in this anthology, the distilled essence of Coventry's legendary Fire and Dust poetry nights. I wouldn't claim to have been the most regular attendee at their monthly events. Working full-time as a lecturer tends to get in the way of a rich and fulfilling social life, especially during marking time! But I always felt
- [Rule by Rationality, Religion or Robots?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/02/10/rule-by-rationality-religion-or-robots/) - The jumping off point for this question is the seeming contradiction that the world is becoming more religious, not less, even as we are moving towards an ever more algorithm-led society. It's worth pointing out at the outset that this is less of a polarised binary than it may initially seem, of course, for a
- [On not reviewing Branagh's 'Belfast'](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/02/05/on-not-reviewing-branaghs-belfast/) - A few people have asked me if I'd seen Branagh's sepia-tinged movie about Belfast. I haven't. I also don't intend to. I'm sure it's great, but it's not for me. I grew up literally one street away, the other side of a fence we euphemistically call a peace line. That fence is there today. It
- [Sidebar of Shame](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/01/30/sidebar-of-shame/) - I have a guilty confession to make. I like tabloids. I used to write for them, quite a few of them in fact. I know a lot of people consider them to be low-rent, inaccurate, trashy or otherwise less than praiseworthy, but I've always thought they had a certain irreverent joie-de-vivre. It's quite difficult to
- [Making Space for Peace](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2022/01/03/making-space-for-peace/) - It's my first publication of the year, and it's a doozy - my review of Richard Howard's amazing book on the Northern Irish SF superstars James White and Bob Shaw. It's in Fafnir, along with a lot of other highly intriguing pieces on, inter alia, AI, aliens, Neil Gaiman, Afrofuturism, you name it. The great
- [Has the singularity already happened?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/12/29/has-the-singularity-already-happened/) - The technological singularity is the moment when technological development becomes unstoppable. It is expected to take the form, should it occur, of a self-aware, or 'sentient' machine intelligence. Most depictions of a post-singularity (machine sentience) world fall into two categories. The first is what I called the Skynet (or Terminator) Complex in Science Fiction and
- [All we need for Christmas is Samuel Beckett (and Buster Keaton)](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/12/20/all-we-need-for-christmas-is-samuel-beckett-and-buster-keaton/) - It is, as Auden wrote of the day Yeats died, “the dead of winter.” On this day, with the brooks frozen, the airports deserted, the statues disfigured by snow and the mercury sinking in the mouth of the day, it is my luck to be (re)reading Samuel Beckett. It's the only time of the year
- [The cyclical nature of etymology](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/12/18/the-cyclical-nature-of-etymology/) - There is, sometimes, a weird cyclical pattern embedded in etymology, the linguistic science of what we might otherwise call the glacial process of Chinese Whispers. Allow me to offer one particularly colourful and occasionally literary example. The (somewhat uncommon) Irish surname Prunty originates from an Anglicisation of the Gaelic Irish surname Ó Proinntigh, meaning ‘descendant
- [The Future of the Call to Prayer](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/12/15/the-future-of-the-call-to-prayer/) - Religion is noisy. Ok, not always. Buddhists like to meditate in silence, for example. But they also like to chant mantras. Most religions have some form of collective ritual singing. And some like to advertise their wares to the public. Christian churches have used bells to do so for many centuries. In areas with large
- [The War on Abstraction](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/12/11/the-war-on-abstraction/) - War on terror can mean devastating Middle Eastern countries on fabricated evidence, or simply comforting a child having a nightmare. War on drugs could mean burning poor farmers crops in Colombia and Afghanistan, incarcerating ravers, introducing CBT counselling for people stranded for decades on SSRIs, or murdering addicts in the Philippines. War on crime can
- [What can we learn from alternative Israels?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/12/05/what-can-we-learn-from-alternative-israels/) - Earlier this year, I started working on a project looking at manifestations of the Jewish state in alternative history literature. The seemingly intractable weeping wound that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, of course, a product of history, but a history which seems increasingly without any obvious resolution, or rather, one in which the much-vaunted two-state
- [Whose civilisation is it, really?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/12/04/whose-civilisation-is-it-really/) - I carry Neanderthal DNA in my body. I am one of the modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens, who are descended from hybrid cross-hominid fertilisation that likely occurred somewhen during the overlap of populations in paelolithic Europe. Of course, that side of the family died out a long time ago, leaving my sapiens ancestors to colonise
- [The Utopian Heresy](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/11/17/the-utopian-heresy/) - So, I was speedreading HG Wells again in advance of teaching him, in the context of his utopianism, and I ended up wondering about utopia's relationship to societal scale. In Wells, dystopia is usually us, by default. By contrast to his Modern Utopia, or The Shape of Things to Come, it is existing society which
- [Rewriting the big history books](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/10/25/rewriting-the-big-history-books/) - Temporary decloaking continues apace, in order to acknowledge the existence of David Graeber's final meisterwerke, which is no less than a history of everything. Alas, it's only volume one, and he is no longer with us on this plane of existence to expand into the envisaged volumes two and so on. This makes it all
- [Understanding the old Ultraviolence](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/10/24/understanding-the-old-ultraviolence/) - It would of course have been more useful had I told more people about this in advance. Nevertheless, I'm a firm believer in the principle that people who need to know things find their way to that knowledge somehow. So it's more as a marker of record, a waystone en route to the actual publication
- [Confessing to the Blab Droid](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/10/23/confessing-to-the-blab-droid/) - I like John Campbell's work. It's always interesting. The abstract for his last book starts like this: "A blab droid is a robot with a body shaped like a pizza box, a pair of treads, and a smiley face. Guided by an onboard video camera, it roams hotel lobbies and conference centers, asking questions in
- [What Scátha Foretold](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/09/29/what-scatha-foretold/) - I asked some students who their favourite literary characters were. Cue a lot of Harry Potter. One asked me in return, first time it's ever happened, oddly enough. So I said Scátha, as you do, and then had to explain who she was. Scátha is a wise warrior woman who lives on the Isle of
- [Amis amasses a mess, alas](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/09/02/amis-amasses-a-mess-alas/) - I had some travelling to do so I picked up a cheap copy of Martin Amis's somewhat recent Inside Story. I like Amis, but it's hard to conceive that he's now over 70, the aged enfant terrible, the bad boy turned pensioner, the literary equivalent of the long superannuated Johnny Rotten. Or is that too
- [The best kind of citation](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/08/19/the-best-kind-of-citation/) - Even the strange and murky currency of academic citation throws up pleasant surprises sometimes. Academics are in some ways regulated by their accumulation of this fiat currency, the citation mill, which requires them to write for the best (ie allegedly most influential) journals, and then subsequently incite references to their work in similarly published articles
- [Pulp Satori](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/08/08/pulp-satori/) - This is, I suppose, the first evidence of the work on Buddhist Futurisms that I've been doing for the past half decade or so. It had an eventful pre-publication history, actually. At one point, it was destined for a book, but that failed to transpire. On another occasion, it was repeatedly sent back for corrections
- [Potternism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/07/13/potternism/) - Everything can be explained through Harry Potter references. Seriously, everything.
- [Before and after religion](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/07/19/before-and-after-religion/) - Was there a time before religion? And could it inspire how we think of a time after religion?
- [Religious Futurisms collection CFP](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/06/18/religious-futurisms-collection-cfp/) - Abstracts invited for a volume of essays on Religious Futurisms, to be published in 2022.
- [Academic Conference Appearances are like Late Night Buses](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/06/16/academic-conference-appearances-are-like-late-night-buses/) - In that they offer uncomfortable seating and there's usually some guy ranting incoherently while everyone else avoids eye contact. Also, you wait ages for one and then a whole bunch arrive at once. Due to circumstances beyond my control, relating primarily to parenthood, emigration and writing commitments, I'd not actually been to a conference in
- [The Chymical Wedding of Samuel Beckett](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/06/03/the-chymical-wedding-of-samuel-beckett/) - There is to be an odd little celebration this month, in Folkestone of all places, to commemorate its visitation by, and subsequent nuptials therein of, Samuel Beckett. Beckett married his long-term partner, as we now know due to a series of excellent biographies, in curious circumstances. He was embroiled in a serious relationship with a
- [What are they saying in Blade Runner?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/05/26/what-are-they-saying-in-blade-runner/) - What is the invented language in 'Blade Runner'? How did it come about? What does it mean? And what does it tell us about how the 1980s saw our current era? Ponying the Slovos explains the Cityspeak in Ridley Scott's posthumanist noir classic.
- [A Fantastikal Voyage](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/05/25/a-fantastikal-voyage/) - It's been out a little while already, but I only just got around to checking out the latest edition of Fantastika journal. It's especially gratifying to see oneself mentioned, not only in Chiara Crosignani's conference report about "Fantastic Religions and Where to Find Them", from Genzano a couple of years ago, but also in Derek
- [The Grapes of Wolf](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/05/22/the-grapes-of-wolf/) - When it comes to lost works of literature, John Steinbeck's unpublished werewolf mystery amounts to five words I never imagined I'd ever write in that order together. Okay, it perhaps might not carry the same cultural weight as rediscovering Aristotle's volume on comedy, or Shakespeare's Love's Labours Won, or Gerard Manley Hopkins' early poetry, or
- [Tiktoking about invented languages](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/05/19/tiktoking-about-invented-languages/) - Our invented languages blog/project got a shout out today from Grammar Girl on Tiktok, which I have to say is new for us. Such is the proliferation of social media platforms nowadays that I kind of gave up some time ago trying to keep up. I don't do Twitter, or Insta or Tiktok. I'm on
- [Sokal Squared come out fighting](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/05/17/sokal-squared-come-out-fighting/) - The so-called 'Sokal Squared' collective who effectively trolled a series of journals a few years back with spoof articles intended to satirise the methodologies, findings and content of social science journals, have been defending their work. By way of aide-memoire for anyone who doesn't recall the 'Grievance Studies' debacle, in 2017 and 2018, three academics
- [Another Israel is Possible](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/05/14/another-israel-is-possible/) - Once again serious trouble and violence has erupted between Israel and Palestinians. Elswhere there is no end of discussion and commentariat media and social media prepared to offer their speculations and insights into why this is currently occurring. Also prevalent are the ideas many people have about how to resolve this seemingly intractable problem. Two-state
- [The Zen of Sci-fi](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/04/29/the-zen-of-sci-fi/) - Karma, they say, is a bitch. But karma is also a balancing act, a mode of returning one's energy back to you. I've been fascinated about religious futurisms for some time now, and already wrote a book about SF's engagement with Catholicism. Since then, I've been working on SF and Buddhism, and anyone who's heard
- [99 Red Balloons Just Flew By](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/04/24/99-red-balloons-just-flew-by/) - I have no nostalgia for the 1980s. The music was poor and got worse as the decade went on. The fashion likewise. The politics of the era - yuppies, conspicuous consumption, haves and have nots kicking off towards the huge disparities we still see today - was especially egregious. I spent almost all of that
- [Meanwhile, in Medieval Rat-Nazis...](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/04/22/meanwhile-in-medieval-rat-nazis/) - At long last, the final post in the series on Anthony Burgess's invented languages has appeared on the Ponying the Slovos project page. This one takes us close to the end of Burgess's career, when his work took an autobiographical turn and he was less inclined to linguistic invention (though no less inventive as his
- [Elena Ferrante is a man - but does it matter?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/04/14/elena-ferrante-is-a-man-but-does-it-matter/) - Elena Ferrante has probably been the biggest literary fiction phenomenon of the 21st century to date. Translated into multiple languages, prize-winning and universally lauded, Ferrante's work, especially the Neapolitan quartet of novels, have generated intense curiosity about the notoriously reclusive and pseudonymous author. Attempts to 'out' Ferrante have been made almost from the beginning, but
- [Speaking at the Dawn of Mankind](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/04/10/speaking-at-the-dawn-of-mankind/) - How did people speak at the dawn of mankind? What was the language of Europe's earliest people? The study of ancient, unrecorded languages is known as paelolinguistics. The attempt to recreate them is as much an art as a science, however, and in that regard, there is no finer artist than Anthony Burgess. Here's the
- [Are we living in an Alternative History?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/03/25/are-we-living-in-an-alternative-history/) - It's a compelling idea. So many outlier events, both the scary Black Swan-type that N.N. Taleb writes about as well as the simply unlikely, seem to be regular occurences all of a sudden. Whether it's Donald Trump's election as US President, the Brexit referendum, a global Coronavirus pandemic, or even just Leicester City somehow winning
- [Orwell and the Porn Dolphins](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/03/24/orwell-and-the-porn-dolphins/) - Another post on PtS about Burgess's invented languages today. (I did say there was 10,000 words of this...) This one is about George Orwell, multicultural Seventies droogs, whether language shapes thought, and Chinese porno dolphins. Yes, you read that correctly. Also some rumination on the linguistics of class warfare and the difficulty of predicting the
- [World Poetry Day 2021](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/03/21/meanwhile-in-a-previous-decade-on-a-previous-continent/) - Happy World Poetry Day. Even in the stasis of global lockdowns, poetry still transports anyone to any time or place, real or imagined, should they only ask. This poem terminates at Lalibela, Ethiopia, sometime in early 2011. Tej The dancers shrug off the world. Everything that moves here moves from the shoulders down. We drink
- [We Must Imagine Sisyphus to be happy](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/03/16/we-must-imagine-sisyphus-to-be-happy/) - A friend was complaining about struggling with writing a section of work. I upchucked my maudlin all over their social media and now feel shame, so instead I'm relocating it to my own space for self-indulgence. You're welcome. Writing is truly Sysiphean. You spend literal aeons of your life doing it, and when it's done
- [Rewriting the Bible](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/03/10/rewriting-the-bible/) - It takes a brave writer to rewrite the Bible, and perhaps a foolhardy one to invent his own macaronic dialect in so doing. The latest article on Anthony Burgess's invented languages at Ponying the Slovos examines how he attempted to evoke the linguistic milieu of the time of Christ in both TV and novel forms.
- [Canticle for Lawrence Ferlinghetti](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/02/24/canticle-for-lawrence-ferlinghetti/) - I met him once, at City Lights, of course. He was a stone cold gentleman. He let me go smoke weed on the roof of the store, because of course he did, and he gave me a book they'd published of the same poem, entitled 'Irish' translated into English from the German by 30 different
- [What if 1916 had never happened?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/02/23/what-if-1916-had-never-happened/) - This alternative history was written at the time of the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin, which had led ultimately to both Irish independence, and partition. It was published in the 16th April 2006 edition of the Irish Mail on Sunday newspaper, where I was a staff journalist. I expect they might hold
- [From Paleolinguistics to Poetry](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/02/18/from-paleolinguistics-to-poetry/) - Into the Seventies and at the midway point of the series on Burgess's invented languages over at Ponying the Slovos. What did people speak before Indo-European languages developed? How many invented languages can you fit into a small novella that's mostly poems? I've attempted to answer those questions there. Bonus: if you ever wondered what
- [Get a free copy of my book!](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/02/10/get-a-free-copy-of-my-book/) - Yes, there's a catch! The Ancillary Review of Books want you to review it. But on the plus side, you also get to be published by the ARB, which is pretty cool. More details here.
- [Middle Eastern Futurism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/02/09/middle-eastern-futurism/) - The MOSF Journal of Science Fiction has produced a fascinating special edition volume focused on what they term Middle Eastern SF (though the inclusion of an article on Iranian 'theory fiction' writer Reza Negarestani suggests a somewhat expansive understanding of Middle East). It's not especially focused on religious futurism, despite the inclusion of a review
- [A Statue for Anthony](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/02/05/a-statue-for-anthony/) - Dublin has a statue of James Joyce. Edinburgh has an entire monument to Walter Scott. Cardiff even has an entire square dedicated to Roald Dahl. But Manchester to date has not recognised its greatest author. Manchester City Council has launched a new consultation exercise on the future of statues and monuments in the city. You
- [Anthony Burgess's Sicily in the Caribbean](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/02/03/anthony-burgesss-sicily-in-the-caribbean/) - The third part of the series on Anthony Burgess's invented languages is now live over at Ponying the Slovos, featuring what just might be Burgess's most significant novel, the weird, wonderful and intensely Structuralist riddle that is M/F. In my book on Anthony Burgess, I pay M/F a lot of attention, because I think it's
- [What do reviews do?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/01/31/what-do-reviews-do/) - The last post was on options for people seeking review outlets for their publications on SF, or alternatively, looking for outlets for whom they might write such reviews. What it didn't address was what those reviews actually do. When you're slogging through the writing of a book, it can be difficult to remain motivated sometimes,
- [Where can I get my book on SF reviewed?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/01/26/where-can-i-get-my-book-on-sf-reviewed/) - This is a follow-up of sorts to the previous article on outlets for publishing book-length SF criticism. Ok, so now you've published your book. It's out. The beautiful hardcopy is in your hands. You want people to know that it exists. What do you do? Well, firstly your publisher should have a publicity department or
- [Where can I publish my book on Science Fiction criticism?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/01/13/where-can-i-publish-my-book-on-science-fiction-criticism/) - I was asked this by a colleague who wanted to turn their doctoral thesis into a monograph. That in itself is not a straightforward task, and there are guides elsewhere on the web discussing that process. In short, a thesis is not a book (yet). Anyhow, once a book is in sight, or at least
- [Messels about the Molodoy](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/01/22/messels-about-the-molodoy/) - While researching my forthcoming book on Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, I came across mention of Molodoy, a shortlived Sheffield punk band of quasi-fascist tendencies whose schtick was that they appeared in full droog regalia on stage. Molodoy is the Nadsat term for young, though it is barely used in the novel. Burgess did however
- [SF and Catholicism on the New Books Network](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/01/21/sf-and-catholicism-on-the-new-books-network/) - I'm archiving the interview I did with the delightful, professional and highly astute Carrie Anne Evans for the New Books Network here. Carrie Anne was an excellent interviewer, very well researched and informed, and asked some great questions. There are pro media interviewers who could learn a lot from how she goes about her work.
- [Rewriting Shakespeare in the Sixties and other inventions](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/01/20/rewriting-shakespeare-in-the-sixties-and-other-inventions/) - The ongoing project to map Anthony Burgess's OTHER invented languages continues over at Ponying the Slovos. In the latest segment, we look at Burgess's often overlooked dystopia, The Wanting Seed, written around the same time as A Clockwork Orange, as well as his superb novel on Shakespeare's love-life, Nothing Like The Sun, and the second
- [In addition to Nadsat](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2021/01/10/in-addition-to-nadsat/) - I'm the co-director of the Ponying the Slovos project which looks at invented languages in translation, predominantly focusing on Nadsat, the teen slang of Alex in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. But Burgess didn't just invent one language for his fiction. In fact, like Tolkien before him, he invented quite a few. So we thought
- [The Rolling Stones and A Clockwork Orange](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/12/27/the-rolling-stones-and-a-clockwork-orange/) - Do you remember the time that the manager of the Rolling Stones parodied A Clockwork Orange on their album sleevenotes, and ended up being mentioned in the House of Lords after a complaint from Bournemouth Society for the Blind? Or the time after that, when the Rolling Stones tried to appear as the droogs in
- [Ray Bradbury, William Blake, and Catholics in Space](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/12/24/ray-bradbury-william-blake-and-catholics-in-space/) - Back when I was writing my book on Science Fiction and Catholicism, I came across a story by Ray Bradbury which I meant to include, but I couldn't decide where to discuss it. On the one hand, it appeared to speak to the Catholic Church's earliest involvement in SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), but on
- [Don't curb your lingthusiasm](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/12/20/dont-curb-your-lingthusiasm/) - “Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity," Henry David Thoreau once wrote. Lingthusiasm, by contrast, is neither supernatural nor serene. It's the state of being excited by language, how it works and how it functions. It's about being fascinated by phonemes, seduced by semantics and in love with lexis. It's why I'm interested in what invented languages
- [Will's dying delirium in 'Nothing Like The Sun'](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/12/10/wills-dying-delirium-in-nothing-like-the-sun/) - Anthony Burgess's 1964 novel Nothing Like The Sun is a literary tour-de-force, inventing not only the details of the notoriously shadowy Shakespeare's life, but also recreating Elizabethan prose in a contemporary novel form in which to do so. It is rightfully regarded as one of Burgess's finest novels. However, some aspects do tend to confuse
- [The multiplying tensions of religion(s) and the future](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/12/03/the-multiplying-tensions-of-religions-and-the-future/) - Just a quick observation on religious futurism(s). With religions, we might term revelatory knowledge, which is deemed to be eternal, of divine or suprahuman provenance and therefore unchangeable wisdom. With the scientific method, we have a progressive, though unending, search for fundamental reality, generated via the attempts to disprove hypotheses empirically. There is clearly a
- [Riddley, Max, Iain and Dave](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/11/21/riddley-max-iain-and-dave/) - My fourth (of three originally intended!) article on Riddley Walker and invented literary languages is now live on the Ponying the Slovos project site. This one looks at the various legacies and tributes to the post-apocalyptic debased English invented by Russell Hoban for Riddley Walker. Unsurprisingly, they're largely post-apocalypse narratives themselves. We have the third
- [As Never Before](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/11/23/as-never-before/) - I was watching football yesterday, and chatting with friends remotely during the match, as so many of us do in these pandemic lockdown socially atomised days. It occurred to me that the narrative arc of a particular player, struggling for form, hitting the post, his anguish and despair, then eventually relief and the breakthrough of
- [Defining Religious Futurism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/11/18/defining-religious-futurism/) - We need a way of taxonomising religious futurisms due to the wide range of territory the term covers. There are three main strands of religious futurism, with a number of additional topics that are at least cognate or germane. The first, and perhaps most recognisable, form of religious futurism simply describes futurisms derived from existing
- [Mythopolitics in South Asia](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/11/16/mythopolitics-in-south-asia/) - The University of Oslo has a number of fascinating research projects and this latest one is of particular interest to anyone intrigued by religious futurism. The Mythopolitics project is looking to recruit a doctoral researcher to examine if and how, 2014 onwards, there have been significant effects on popular public opinion and the political culture
- [Enjoy the Sylents](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/11/14/enjoy-the-sylents/) - Okay, I lied. There will in fact by four articles in total on Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker at the Ponying the Slovos project site. This one's the third of four now, and does the heavy lifting, addressing the linguistic structure of Riddleyspeak and navigating through some of the earlier critical perspectives on Hoban's language invention.
- [Robert Fisk and Islamofuturism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/11/02/robert-fisk-and-islamofuturism/) - Only two weeks after this wonderful documentary about the work of Robert Fisk was released, the man himself is dead. He was a paragon of journalism, whose doorstop book, The Great War for Civilisation, based on his PhD taken at Trinity College Dublin, is the single best explanation for why we find ourselves in the
- [Sum Poasyum](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/10/24/sum-poasyum/) - Today, scholars, academics, artists and writers will gather (except they won't, this being plague year) in Canterbury (ie virtually but hosted there) to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. It's an astonishing novel, an evocative work of post-apocalyptic world set millennia in the future but demonstrating how the future
- [Deriding Derrida](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/10/16/deriding-derrida/) - Obfuscatory and certainly overrated he was, but perhaps we are slowly approaching something like an honest appraisal of Jacques Derrida, a midwit philosopher not without nuance, though it was often difficult to identify among the verbiage. He was, for a time, the king of theory, the verbose form of analysis that gobbled up literary criticism
- [Riddley me this](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/10/14/riddley-me-this/) - So, after a summer hiatus, there's a new post on the Ponying the Slovos blog, the first of three looking at Russell Hoban's post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. Hoban's novel, like A Clockwork Orange, deals with dystopia by distorting the language, the very means of communication between author and
- [Stranger in a Brave New World](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/10/06/stranger-in-a-brave-new-world/) - Recently I've been researching Heinlein, for the ongoing project on Buddhist futurism, but also in light of Farah Mendelsohn's recent book, which I have sitting on the shelf, waiting to be read properly. I thought it would be worth catching up on existing criticism of Heinlein first before tackling her magnum opus, so among other
- [What is religious futurism?](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/09/19/what-is-religious-futurism/) - Best perhaps to start with what it's not. It's not a form of futurology, or attempting to predict what has yet to take place. Few people during the tenure of Pope John Paul II would have predicted that his right-hand man would relinquish Peter's throne in favour of an Argentinian Jesuit. Futurology is best left
- [Ten Grand](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/09/20/ten-grand/) - I was on the BBC this morning discussing, inter alia, the UK government's decision to implement fines of up to £10,000 for people who fail to quarantine themselves when directed to do so. It seemed to me that this is yet another example of the government attempting to be seen to be doing something while
- [Baby haiku](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/09/23/baby-haiku/) - Infant’s on the floor. A plush blue llama flies by Covered in his sick.
- [Welcome to JimClarke.Net](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/2020/09/18/welcome-to-jimclarke-net/) - Thanks for dropping by. I'll be updating about the various research and publishing projects I'm involved in here.

## Pages

- [Dr Jim Clarke](https://jimclarke.net/) - Welcome to the pleasuredome. Latest blog posts can be found here. Stuff about me is here. The links above will take you to static pages about some of the work I do.
- [About](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/about-2/) - I am a writer, researcher, academic and (mis)translator. I am the author of two monographs and dozens of peer-reviewed academic articles. My work has been cited hundreds of times. I have also published a novel, and my fiction has been published by Heinemann and Minerva, among others. Academically, I take an interest in lots of
- [Religious Futurisms](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/religious-futurisms/) - Mostly what I research these days relates to the burgeoning field of religious futurisms. What shape will religions take under the challenge of ongoing technological development? How might the dawn of posthumanism, AI or alien lifeforms reshape terrestrial faiths? The world is becoming MORE religious, not less. We need to account for that, and attempt
- [The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/anthony-burgess/) - I write quite often about Anthony Burgess. My various posts about him and his work may be found here. The debates about modernity and modernism seem neverending, especially since we now accept that postmodernism is over, but we aren't agreed on what follows postmodernism. One thing we can be certain of, however, is that modernism
- [Invented Languages](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/invented-languages/) - From Klingon to Elvish, from Newspeak to Nadsat, I have a passionate interest in invented languages; why people invent languages, what purposes those languages serve, and what they can tell us about our organic languages. I've organised an international conference on them, and written about them in the media. I'm the co-director of a research
- [Dystopias and Climate Fiction](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/dystopias-and-climate-fiction/) - We're living in a dystopia right now. All of us. A climate dystopia, where our planet is falling out of equilibrium and potentially into a meterological state which puts many millions of us in peril. Of course, writers and artists have been responding to this crisis, and indeed they have been doing so for some
- [Fiction](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/fiction/) - I was first published in a small magazine in Belfast at the age of 17. Actually, that's a lie. I first published myself in a fanzine I edited at the age of 15. When I was 18, my fiction won a national writing award in Ireland and I've since been published by Heinemann and Minerva.
- [Whisk(e)y](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/whiskey/) - Whiskey was first created, so far as historians can tell, in the north of Ireland. Despite stiff opposition from the pneumatic tyre, milk chocolate and the tractor, it is the north of Ireland's supreme contribution to the world, in my opinion. I've drunk it all my adult life, sometimes to excess admittedly! Usually, though, I've
- [Speculative Geographies](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/speculative-geographies/) - Why do people invent worlds? Largely, because they wish to tell stories set in them. This process, known as worldbuilding, informs everything from fiction to videogaming, and underpins a lot of ontological and logical philosophy. Why, however, do they so often also map them? What are the purpose of maps of non-existent places? What purpose,

## Categories

- [Uncategorized](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/uncategorized/)
- [Religious Futurism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/religious-futurism/)
- [Radio](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/radio/)
- [Poetry](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/poetry/)
- [Invented Languages](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/invented-languages/)
- [Literary Criticism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/literary-criticism/)
- [Academic Life](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/academic-life/)
- [Politics](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/uncategorized/politics/)
- [Football](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/uncategorized/football/)
- [Cinema](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/cinema/)
- [Music](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/uncategorized/music/)
- [Television](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/television/)
- [Fiction](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/fiction/)
- [Journalism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/uncategorized/journalism/)
- [Alternative History](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/alternative-history/)
- [Theatre](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/uncategorized/theatre/)
- [History](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/uncategorized/history/)
- [Economics](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/economics/)
- [Education](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/education/)
- [Whiskey](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/uncategorized/whiskey/)
- [Technology](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/uncategorized/technology/)
- [Speculative Geographies](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/category/speculative-geographies/)

## Tags

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- [James Blish](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/james-blish/)
- [Martin Amis](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/martin-amis/)
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- [Scátha](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/scatha/)
- [Irish mythology](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/irish-mythology/)
- [Red Branch](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/red-branch/)
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- [David Graeber](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/david-graeber/)
- [Big History](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/big-history/)
- [utopia](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/utopia/)
- [HG Wells](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/hg-wells/)
- [Dunbar number](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/dunbar-number/)
- [climate crisis](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/climate-crisis/)
- [neanderthal](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/neanderthal/)
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- [Floriensis](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/floriensis/)
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- [civilisation](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/civilisation/)
- [terror](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/terror/)
- [drugs](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/drugs/)
- [abstraction](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/abstraction/)
- [Colombia](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/colombia/)
- [Afghanistan](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/afghanistan/)
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- [Robert E. Howard](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/robert-e-howard/)
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- [geese](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/geese/)
- [Buster Keaton](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/buster-keaton/)
- [Charles Dickens](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/charles-dickens/)
- [Christmas](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/christmas/)
- [W.B. Yeats](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/w-b-yeats/)
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- [algorithms](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/algorithms/)
- [singularity](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/singularity/)
- [Terminator](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/terminator/)
- [Irish SF](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/irish-sf/)
- [Richard Howard](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/richard-howard/)
- [Bob Shaw](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/bob-shaw/)
- [James White](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/james-white/)
- [Daily Mail](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/daily-mail/)
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- [Kenneth Branagh](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/kenneth-branagh/)
- [sectarianism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/sectarianism/)
- [war](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/war/)
- [Steven Pinker](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/steven-pinker/)
- [Yuval Harari](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/yuval-harari/)
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- [rationality](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/rationality/)
- [economics](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/economics/)
- [Turkey](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/turkey/)
- [hyperinflation](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/hyperinflation/)
- [Cappadocia](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/cappadocia/)
- [coventry](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/coventry/)
- [dust](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/dust/)
- [ukraine](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/ukraine/)
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- [media](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/media/)
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- [fiction](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/fiction/)
- [JG Ballard](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/jg-ballard/)
- [Neal Stephenson](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/neal-stephenson/)
- [Haruki Murakami](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/haruki-murakami/)
- [Ian McEwan](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/ian-mcewan/)
- [David Mitchell](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/david-mitchell/)
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- [Suede](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/suede/)
- [Britpop](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/britpop/)
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- [beer](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/beer/)
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- [PR](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/pr/)
- [pay to play](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/pay-to-play/)
- [impact](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/impact/)
- [outreach](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/outreach/)
- [Judaism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/judaism/)
- [Christianity](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/christianity/)
- [Islam](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/islam/)
- [Judeofuturism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/judeofuturism/)
- [Christian Futurism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/christian-futurism/)
- [Temple Mount](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/temple-mount/)
- [Jerusalem](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/jerusalem/)
- [mesopotamia](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/mesopotamia/)
- [dreams](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/dreams/)
- [dreaming](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/dreaming/)
- [multiverse](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/multiverse/)
- [Invernetics](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/invernetics/)
- [conspiracy](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/conspiracy/)
- [conspiracy theories](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/conspiracy-theories/)
- [Illuminati](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/illuminati/)
- [fake news](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/fake-news/)
- [nickel](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/nickel/)
- [metal](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/metal/)
- [commodities](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/commodities/)
- [LME](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/lme/)
- [Oxford](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/oxford/)
- [Minsk](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/minsk/)
- [Soviet Union](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/soviet-union/)
- [alcohol](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/alcohol/)
- [temperance](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/temperance/)
- [English Civil War](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/english-civil-war/)
- [town planning](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/town-planning/)
- [genetics](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/genetics/)
- [evolution](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/evolution/)
- [human](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/human/)
- [homo sapiens](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/homo-sapiens/)
- [Europe](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/europe/)
- [Europeans](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/europeans/)
- [Patrizia Cavalli](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/patrizia-cavalli/)
- [Elon Musk](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/elon-musk/)
- [space travel](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/space-travel/)
- [Mars](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/mars/)
- [SpaceX](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/spacex/)
- [housing crisis](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/housing-crisis/)
- [average income](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/average-income/)
- [income disparity](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/income-disparity/)
- [population](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/population/)
- [Malthus](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/malthus/)
- [growth](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/growth/)
- [Cairo](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/cairo/)
- [Egypt](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/egypt/)
- [Congo](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/congo/)
- [Nigeria](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/nigeria/)
- [depression](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/depression/)
- [ADHD](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/adhd/)
- [anxiety](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/anxiety/)
- [hallucinations](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/hallucinations/)
- [aggression](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/aggression/)
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- [George R.R. Martin](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/george-r-r-martin/)
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- [Brian Aldiss](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/brian-aldiss/)
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- [Stoicism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/stoicism/)
- [Epictetus](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/epictetus/)
- [Kubler-Ross](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/kubler-ross/)
- [grief](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/grief/)
- [William Trevor](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/william-trevor/)
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- [Michael Moorcock](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/michael-moorcock/)
- [capitalism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/capitalism/)
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- [holocaust](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/holocaust/)
- [zionism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/zionism/)
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- [civil war](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/civil-war/)
- [Xi](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/xi/)
- [silicon valley](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/silicon-valley/)
- [Marc Andreessen](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/marc-andreessen/)
- [alchemy](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/alchemy/)
- [Warhammer](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/warhammer/)
- [Anne Rice](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/anne-rice/)
- [Mark O'Connell](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/mark-oconnell/)
- [New York Times](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/new-york-times/)
- [longevity](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/longevity/)
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- [culture wars](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/culture-wars/)
- [meme](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/meme/)
- [Mao](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/mao/)
- [data centres](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/data-centres/)
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- [transhumanism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/transhumanism/)
- [free will](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/free-will/)
- [veganism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/veganism/)
- [vegetarianism](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/vegetarianism/)
- [cattle](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/cattle/)
- [Luis de Gongora](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/luis-de-gongora/)
- [Dead Can Dance](https://jimclarke.net/index.php/tag/dead-can-dance/)