Lost Xplorers

188 - Storylistening

From Kris's notes:

I take the view that visual Art begins at the crossroads of eyes and hands. A stick or a bone is good…dust mixed with water. Blood. It’s a start. (With Sculpture, the question seems to me to be how does one escape? The whole world including open ocean is one vast sculpture park.) With music, hands and voice are the original party starters…splashing water. Two rocks would be handy. Maybe a blade of grass or a taut vine. (What’s not a musical instrument?) Work from there. When it comes to Story however, then I reckon some serious cultural technology is required. Language. Repeatable fire perhaps. It’s interesting to me that we have elaborate formal notions of Storytelling….and later endless pedagogies regarding the learned skill of Reading. It’s very hard to find a guide to Storylistening. It’s harder still to find the coherence of connection (satisfactory or not) between Storylistening and Storytelling that we have with Reading and Writing.

187 - Giving Each Other Language

JDO gives his AWP trip. Lots of books sold! Many of JDO’s ideas about how culture is were troubled by how cool everybody was. Is the negativity we hear online…just an online thing?

Is there value in starting a collective rather than pursuing publication by an indie press or traditional publishers?

The distinctiveness of Christopher Walken’s accent…and Kris’s. The disappearance of regional American accents, Korean accents, and British accents.

Super Bowl ads…where is the Latino representation? 

The American refusal to grow up is directly related to their fear of death. Or maybe their refusal to accept death.

We talk about Taboo and Tom Hardy, and Hardy’s secret rap career. The brilliance of Daniel Day-Lewis, and the troubles with an adaptation with J.G. Ballard’s work.

Super Bowl conspiracy theories. Usher’s halftime show. America’s tryhard lameness and sinister division. Are Americans inherently dishonest people?

JDO’s imaginative challenge gives him free reign to be as evil as he wants to be…but at a terrible cost.

Receiving language from dogs. Where do the words we speak come from. More importantly, WHO do they come from? 

186 - Thoughts on Waking

SHOW NOTES...

We’ve been talking a lot about Education of late, and the insurmountable problem of getting kids interested in reading if they aren’t already. Two clear thoughts have emerged.

     One, I think the tired but all-too-accurate metaphor that American society is an Allegory of High School (jocks, cheerleaders, druggies and criminals in the making, nerds, and disaffected sub-groups, etc.) is becoming more concrete and congruent with each passing year. The only new element I see is the School Shooting. Telling.

      But as I was thinking about reading in this context, I realized I don’t recall learning to read myself very well. I vividly remember the discomfort of learning to handwrite (print and cursive). The pencils always seemed too big for my hands. What I do recall about early reading is that it meant Independence. I didn’t have to rely on my grandmother or older sister. For me, reading was an expression of masculine self-determination—stepping out from the females who both dominated and positively directed my young life. How many people today would see reading as an expression of masculinity? How odd. Only a short while ago, our most important poets were men like James Dickey, James Wright, and W.S. Merwin. Those days seem long ago.

     The second thought to reveal itself from this stream was The Bicycle. I used to ride my green Schwinn 3-speed to a bookstore in a strip mall to purchase the next Hardy Boy book I hadn’t read. One rainy day, I realized I’d eventually run out of Hardy Boys…so I feverishly began creating my own deeply imitative series The Benton Boys. My real, private passion about writing came out of Fan Fiction. I openly borrowed characters. I just didn’t want to run out of story.

     I paid for the Green Bike myself…with the money I earned cleaning toilets and vacuuming floors for an industrial dry cleaner, starting at age 9. The job gave me more than $ and work ethic pride. It was a place to be after school in the strange days following my violent rape in 4^th grade. The Green Bike was what I needed. The rape would never have happened if I’d had a bike. I made a major correction of reality. The Hardy Boys entered in…and then the Benton Boys. Reading + Green Bike = Independence.

185 - A Meritocracy of Magic

SHOW NOTES...

 

Relaxed, deep sleep is perhaps the single best natural healing agent there is. If we wake slowly, there’s still a profound vibration of nurture, if not immediate refreshment. But pattern is the key. The reliability of satisfying sleep is elemental to its satisfaction.

     Consider this then. We live in a time increasingly characterized by sleep problems. Go to the appropriate aisle in any pharmacy. It’s a big aisle. The problem is an epidemic—but not a pandemic. Yet.

     But are sleeping problems seeping, and sweeping around the globe?

     With a focus on Insomnia, but not excluding other sleep disorders (such as apnea, restless leg syndrome, nightmares, etc.), what if we asked this question: Is it possible that the simplest and yet most coherent and embracing explanation of Modernity is Trouble Sleeping?

     Is this an oversimplification—or is it a sigilization? (Isn’t Sigilization an interesting counter to Civilization?)

-The Age of Trolls, the Age of Apps. Throngs of Dolls. Structures collapse.

I’m afraid of the Death of Mythos…the overgrown abandoned Labyrinth. In Israel, they used to show porn films at drive-in-movie theaters. Big screen. Little known fact.

     I’m afraid of a descent into nightmare without magic. Ceremonies degenerating into Spectacle. Incoherent rituals of violence. Not a visionary brutalism, full of geometry and High Ideals. Not a bestial, sensual hedonism of misguided Innocence and clichéd desires. No. A kind of barbed wire methamphetamine mutant amnesia.

-My big concern with Education (and all that it represents in terms of class mobility) is the collapse of standards in the name of Diversity and Inclusion. The radical Left claims this is a misnomer, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Many go much further, believing the degradation of performance assessment is not only very real, and not merely collateral damage—it’s their explicit goal. Cancel the Meritocracy. Everyone’s a winner, baby.

184 - The Unspeakable Shadow of the Individual

FROM KRIS SAKNUSSEMM'S NOTES 1/23/24

 

Hidden Terrain…

What appears to be mythic exhaustion—the Jungian Collective Unconsciousness turned to Dustbowl—may be a socially engineered fiction.

Our psychological / mental health apparatus is dysfunctional and overwhelmed. All our approaches center on social-public behaviors. As several noted sex researchers lament, what incentive do people have to share their private psychic experiences honestly? Is it necessarily obvious that they can do this even they desired to do so? Meanwhile, imagination on almost every day-to-day level is discouraged.

We find ourselves fixated on an aspect of Mind that is fundamentally limited, and in denial of one that must be at least provisionally viewed as unlimited. The result is a crisis-level imbalance between Logos and Mythos on the scale of Culture, where Logos has degenerated into a hyperspecialized (autistic) focus on Numeros: pure computational processing, and Mythos is cut off from Hypnos at the intimate personal level. Kerouac’s “unspeakable visions of the individual” are now entirely in shadow. Outlawed. What we value is the visible-physical and performative. (Covid masks as iconic expression of our time).

Imbalance + Corruption / Degeneration. Solution? The whole Lost Xplorers program celebrates a resurgence of Hypnos as a means to nourish and reinforce Mythos and to rehabilitate Logos by alchemizing Numeros back into its original position within the Family of Mind. I think it could be helpful to view the angst, distress, polarity, and violence of our age as a Family Problem writ large.

183 - Lava Lamp Creativity

First day back teaching. Education of today no longer lines up with the needs of young people. What if education was project-based? Outdoors?

Kris recounts his history with his Black Mountain Nemesis. Is there something wrong with the architecture of schools? The impossibility of convincing teenagers who don’t like to read, to read.

What’s going on with the price of sandwiches? Kris’s band for the day: THE LUXURIANTS! Radical wealth excess. A scathing attack on fandom. Is there any real cultural commentary going on anymore?

Stores used to be hubs of underground fandoms. Those don’t exist anymore. Kris and I talk about great bookstores. If there is an underground, Kris and I would love to be a part of them.

Hidden algorithms and inherent structures. Is the way out through treasure hunting? Forcing people away from the gardens, from cultivation, is having disastrous consequences.

We are turning away from ancient patterns of dreaming. Jack Kerouac called Charlie Parker “a creator of forms.” Who is creating forms now?

JDO puts forward his idea of “lava lamp creativity.” How does a story actually form? It’s worth creating a story in a group to find out. Where did the phrase “it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick” come from?

Collective imaginative dreaming leads to lava bubble magic. Where things get fuzzy and immaterial, that is the realm of human dreaming and imagination. Hidden terrain, socially engineered fiction, and spiritual crisis.

Dilbert and The Office as signals of the end. The rise of the middle management. What do these people do? Who knows?

JDO delivers his mentor profile in the form of a short crime story. Taking care of yourself with the idea that you might have someone to take care of one day.

Kris recalls Sonny Bono’s PSA on drug abuse. “One day you’ll be the older generation.” Kris muses on euphemism. Wondering what it would be like to live in the houses that you pass on the road.

Enjoy nostalgia. Dream is the aquarium of night.

182 - A Bureaucracy of Ghosts

Snow on the mountains. Starting to teach Jurassic Park. The tallest novelist of all time. Crichton’s most controversial novel. Was Crichton a good novelist?

Trapped in the bathroom. Is the science ever settled?

Harmful Content. Militant non-musicians. Compliance. Kris vs. The Looping World. Lost malls. Hunting for bookstores in a small town. The worst bookstore in the history of America. Return policies on dirty magazines.

Osmos with the cosmos, or you will be socializing with a bureaucracy of ghosts. Sex positive interrogative counter-scientism societal utopianism.

Indistinguishable news organizations. Garmonbozia pablum. Does Liberal and Conservative mean anything? Should we have a Women Party and a Men Party? People can’t see anything from another point of view, but more importantly, they can’t see their own point of view.

Kindness as a placating sinister force. People get more feral the more “nice” the conversation gets.

Giving people responsibilities. The Gold Bar Test. Cults are about structure. Preview of 2024.

JDO’s imaginative challenge brings him to Swift Current, where a man wheels a cross through town and a Chinese restauranteur has problems with his fake hand.

The Harari Main Market. The chaos of markets, the harmony of trading. Looking closely at Mayan and Aztec societies. Hardy Boys cover designs. Reassessment of danger from the fear of serfs to a kind of danger you’d want to be a part of.

181 - The Memory Game

Kris and I get in the holiday spirit!

Well, we start off cheery, at least.

Learning how to reuse the internet. Crossing the Drake Passage. The Truth About Dinosaurs. Shout out Jay for putting me on to new ways to surf the web.

Are you using your tools, or are your tools using you?

Robot Santa Carnival of Blood.

Kris has invented The Memory Game. Which game improves memory the most? JDO attempts to rank them.

Intuition vs. memory.

JDO’s imaginative exercise leads to “Polycule Slaughterhouse.”

JDO reads a new piece he’s been working on. As above, so below.

Kris takes us out with a great new piece of music, holiday-themed, called "3 Men on the Move."

180 - Keep Them on the Phone

We've got a slightly darker episode this time around. But there's lots of valuable insight to be had.

Kris meets a magician named Kent Axell.

Area 15 in Vegas. JDO vents about frustrations with adminstrators. Being a high school teacher is kind of like being Tyler Durden. Learning how to teach The Great Gatsby. The tragic figure of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

A potluck band. Tribal music making. Bighorn sheep at the lake. Is the universe top-down or bottom-up? JDO shares his line art with Kris.

BIG IDEAS! Where are we going in 2024?

Kris tells a story about the time he saw a man jump off a bridge. This leads to a longer discussion about suicide and the mass shooting phenomenon as a form of suicide.

People are seeking oblivion, although it might not look like you’d expect. Is social media driving teens to suicide? Society doesn’t want to look at what is causing these mass suicides.

The power of spooning. A little time by the river. Loneliness is killing society. People who are giant walking red flags. Sanity = the history of heresy.

The inability to map the weather. Huntsman spiders. Climate as a huge idea. Take some responsibility!

Have we reach a point of too much signal? There’s no noise if you have dedication to something. We seem unable to protect cargo. Stewardship. The importance of honor.

Meaning = decision/choice. Let things roll. Don’t take so much control. Let natural cycles take hold. Fall into the groove. Don’t accept scolds and nags.

The hanged man where the chandelier should be. Dreams about you as the observer.

179 - Why Do We Have to Do Things that We Do Not Want to Do?

Look out for another new episode dropping on Saturday!

Words of the year.  The etymology of authentic. JDO talks about getting a bunch of birthday cards. Visual novels.

Mother Killed by Shark. Do You Know Where Your Parents Are? The inverse of a viking helmet. Pharrel’s Dudley Do Right hat.

What about all the good things cults have done? The strangeness of time. Every Wednesday is the same Wednesday.

Going full Bartleby. The singularity of the scrivener. Why do we have to do anything? Yielding sovereignty. Imperative. Septic tanks in the country.

Dunce cap questions are important. Extremists show us that we don’t *have* to do anything. Acquiescence to the must.

Chores we like vs. chores that we do. The satisfactory service of Chik-fil-A. The theory of logical types. Staying in the emblematic groove of our lives.

Becoming a collective requires having your own agency first. Fascination with samurai and yakuza. Gatsby’s dead-on commentary on class. Not fitting in with the upper-middle-class literary establishment.

Every president tries to convince you that they were born in a log cabin they built themselves.

JDO’s imaginative challenge involves the personification of Tabbo.

How can we take music to the level of sound? What does that mean for a whole range of things?

Power is a problem.