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Using Ghosts to Understand Telephone Wires: Folklore as Cultural Ontology
Careful readers will have noticed the tagline of this blog, a critical look at the stories we tell about ourselves. As with most good taglines, this immediately raises some questions. Who is we? What stories? What is thing called telling, Earth man? So the standard academic definition of folklore is going to be something along […]
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Where Did My Pen Go? A Brief Theory of How to Understand the Universe
A Brief Theory of How to Understand the Universe Let’s start with a truism. Those are always good. To live is to continually encounter the unknowable. And boy, that unknowable is everywhere. Every time we ask a question to which we practically cannot get a definitive answer, we are encountering the unknowable. The unknowable can include […]
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Finding the Sacred in Infrastructure
Several years ago, when I was living in Houston, I had a seemingly inconsequential thought that grew and shaped itself until it transformed the way I see the world. Houston can do that to you. Certain times of the year, large flocks of large, black birds will congregate on the power lines. It’s clearly multiple […]
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The Night Side of Nature: Catherine Crowe and the Origins of the Supernatural
In 1848, an English woman published a work that every ghost story, every horror movie, every Creepypasta that has come since owes a debt to. She was Catherine Crowe, and the book was The Night Side of Nature. There had been other collections of ghost stories that had come before, but Crowe’s approach was radically […]