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1000 results for “Gill_the_MT”
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I still learn new #clamFacts all the time. TIL of the rosy bitterling! Freshwater mussel larvae are famed for grabbing onto fish to ride upstream attaching to the gills or other surfaces and often stealing resources from the host fish. The rosy bitterling fish flips the script and lays its eggs in the gill cavity of mussels, with the male then adding insult to injury depositing sperm. The embryos live embedded in the gills, emerging as tiny fish!
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"Almost 1,000 Japanese holothuroid haiku translated into English appear in the book Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! by Robin D. Gill."
(from the Wikipedia article on sea cucumbers)If I am ever compelled to sail the briny blue as a pirate queen, my battle cry shall most assuredly be RISE, YE SEA SLUGS!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_cucumber
#SeaSlugs #SeaCucumbers #haiku #poetry #RiseYeSeaSlugs -
"Almost 1,000 Japanese holothuroid haiku translated into English appear in the book Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! by Robin D. Gill."
(from the Wikipedia article on sea cucumbers)If I am ever compelled to sail the briny blue as a pirate queen, my battle cry shall most assuredly be RISE, YE SEA SLUGS!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_cucumber
#SeaSlugs #SeaCucumbers #haiku #poetry #RiseYeSeaSlugs -
https://www.europesays.com/ie/190624/ Vince Gill Accepts the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Honor at the CMA Awards #BrandiCarlile #CMAAwards #Éire #Entertainment #GeorgeStrait #IE #Ireland #LifetimeAchievementAward #Music #PattyLoveless #VinceGill #WillieNelson
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Movie TV Tech Geeks #Exclusives #Cross #AlonaTal #JohnnyRayGill 'Cross' Season 2 Stars Alona Tal and Johnny Ray Gill Explain the Deeper Layers of Episode 6's "Down and Dirty" Pool Fight http://dlvr.it/TRPdmG
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Seven years into my study of Australian colonial artist S T Gill, I've been getting more frequent enquiries about works for sale. I'd responded up till now but now felt I needed to set a better boundary.
I'm a retired systems designer. My motivation for the Gill project is to contribute to knowledge commons and the public good – hence the near exclusive focus on works held by public collecting institutions. This keeps me busy enough. (Web site now updated to that effect.)
As it's the first day of the month, here's Gill's "August": https://coombe.id.au/S_T_Gill/S_T_Gill's_The_Seasons_and_The_Months.htm#133
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Seven years into my study of Australian colonial artist S T Gill, I've been getting more frequent enquiries about works for sale. I'd responded up till now but now felt I needed to set a better boundary.
I'm a retired systems designer. My motivation for the Gill project is to contribute to knowledge commons and the public good – hence the near exclusive focus on works held by public collecting institutions. This keeps me busy enough. (Web site now updated to that effect.)
As it's the first day of the month, here's Gill's "August": https://coombe.id.au/S_T_Gill/S_T_Gill's_The_Seasons_and_The_Months.htm#133
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Some beautiful Agaricus urinascens about today perfect and maggot free which is rare for these , the gill shot is off the small one in picture. #foragingforfood #forager #foragedfood #fungi #mushroomkingdom
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SWANSEA: From -191 goal difference to promoted — Cwm Albion complete the most remarkable turnaround in Welsh football
The 114-year-old Swansea club secured promotion to Division One of the Swansea Senior League on Saturday with a thumping 6-2 victory over African Community Centre — completing one of the most remarkable turnarounds in grassroots football anywhere in Wales.
The win sparked wild celebrations among players, staff and supporters who had endured some very dark days not so long ago.
In the 2022/23 season, Cwm Albion finished bottom of Division Four with a goal difference of -191.
They lost every single game.
It was as bad as it sounds — and it earned them a rather unwanted distinction.
Specsavers selected them as its “Best Worst Team” — an initiative designed to help the UK’s worst-performing grassroots club turn things around.
The support that followed included mentorship from footballing legend Harry Redknapp, who worked with the squad and helped attract new players to the club.
The transformation began almost immediately. Within a season, Cwm Albion went from a team conceding ten goals a game to one that couldn’t be beaten.
They then reached a cup final for the first time in 26 years — a moment that would have been unthinkable during those bleak days at the bottom of Division Four.
And now, promotion.
Manager Dan Gill said the achievement was hard to take in. “Three seasons ago we couldn’t buy a win, we were conceding games heavily every week,” he said. “To go from that to now being promoted in the Swansea Senior League is unbelievable. Looking back, it doesn’t even feel like the same club anymore.”
Gill said the Specsavers initiative had been the turning point. “We’ve got more players coming in, we’re winning more, scoring more and conceding less,” he said. “I’m so proud of everyone involved.”
He said other clubs had been asking how Cwm Albion kept going during the worst of it. “It just shows how far we’ve come,” he added.
Saturday’s 6-2 win takes them into Division One next season — and nobody who watched them three years ago would have believed it possible.
The Cwm Albion story
Harry Redknapp helps Swansea amateur side deemed UK’s worst performing football team
How the Specsavers Best Worst Team initiative brought Harry Redknapp to Cwm Albion.Cwm Albion turn from Best Worst Team to unbeaten heroes
The remarkable transformation that followed Specsavers’ involvement.Former worst team in the UK reach cup final for first time in 26 years
#CwmAlbion #football #Specsavers #Swansea #SwanseaSeniorLeague
The moment that showed how far Cwm Albion had come. -
23 Years ago, I took a little walk up the Borrowdale fells on a beautiful sunny frosty winters day. I recall having to avoid the granular hard snow patches on the path up by the gill else I'd have shot 30 metres or so into a ravine . Dangerous places, mountains, if you aren't careful! #Borrowdale #LakeDistrict #Winter #Trees #Copse #Wood #Photography
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23 Years ago, I took a little walk up the Borrowdale fells on a beautiful sunny frosty winters day. I recall having to avoid the granular hard snow patches on the path up by the gill else I'd have shot 30 metres or so into a ravine . Dangerous places, mountains, if you aren't careful! #Borrowdale #LakeDistrict #Winter #Trees #Copse #Wood #Photography
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23 Years ago, I took a little walk up the Borrowdale fells on a beautiful sunny frosty winters day. I recall having to avoid the granular hard snow patches on the path up by the gill else I'd have shot 30 metres or so into a ravine . Dangerous places, mountains, if you aren't careful! #Borrowdale #LakeDistrict #Winter #Trees #Copse #Wood #Photography
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23 Years ago, I took a little walk up the Borrowdale fells on a beautiful sunny frosty winters day. I recall having to avoid the granular hard snow patches on the path up by the gill else I'd have shot 30 metres or so into a ravine . Dangerous places, mountains, if you aren't careful! #Borrowdale #LakeDistrict #Winter #Trees #Copse #Wood #Photography
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23 Years ago, I took a little walk up the Borrowdale fells on a beautiful sunny frosty winters day. I recall having to avoid the granular hard snow patches on the path up by the gill else I'd have shot 30 metres or so into a ravine . Dangerous places, mountains, if you aren't careful! #Borrowdale #LakeDistrict #Winter #Trees #Copse #Wood #Photography
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Jackdaw and saltwater crocodile, by far! Both belong to the group Archosauria (which also once contained all the jackdaw's dinosaur ancestors), and have a common ancestor about 250 million years ago. They're actually more closely related to each other than either of them is to any lizard - yes, a crocodile is more closely related to a bird than to a lizard.
A gecko is precisely as closely related to a salamander as you are, dear reader, at least assuming you're human. Modern mammals and reptiles are both amniotes, a lineage that diverged from that of the modern amphibians way back in the Carboniferous, some 320 million years ago. Amniotes pioneered all the cool features that allowed vertebrates to start living far inland: They got rid of the gill-breathing young stage, developed thicker keratinized (and no longer water-permeable) skin, and developed shelled eggs that could be laid on dry land rather than the gel-based eggs amphibians lay in water. The last common ancestor of a gecko and a salamander is *the same animal* as the last common ancestor of a human being and a salamander.
That said: Modern amphibians have evolved just as much since then as we amniotes have, and they have a lot of weird innovations that amniotes never came up with. Frogs are perhaps the most specialized jumping vertebrate of all. There are salamanders that have no lungs and breathe entirely through their skin! And some have independently ditched the tadpole stage and hatch as little "froglets" ... a few species have even adapted to bearing live young rather than laying eggs at all.
(One niche modern amphibians have largely left to us amniotes is ... vegetarianism. There is only one known species of herbivorous amphibian in the world.)
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Bharat Kapoor, veteran actor best known for films like Barsaat and Balidaan, dies at 80 due to cardiac arrest
Veteran actor Bharat Kapoor has died. He was 80. The actor’s friend Avatar Gill confirmed the news to…
#NewsBeep #News #Celebrities #AU #Australia #BharatKapoor #bharatkapoordeath #bharatkapoordies #bharatkapoorfilms #CardiacArrest #Entertainment
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/634990/ -
Bharat Kapoor, veteran actor best known for films like Barsaat and Balidaan, dies at 80 due to cardiac arrest
Veteran actor Bharat Kapoor has died. He was 80. The actor’s friend Avatar Gill confirmed the news to…
#NewsBeep #News #Celebrities #AU #Australia #BharatKapoor #bharatkapoordeath #bharatkapoordies #bharatkapoorfilms #CardiacArrest #Entertainment
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/634990/ -
Good #evening everyone 🌙
Todays #fungifind 🍄
Deer Shield / Mushroom! (Pluteus cervinus)
The Deer Shield is a #wood-rotting fungus that occurs mainly on hardwood #stumps. This fungus can appear at any time from late #spring through to late #autumn.
Although its caps are usually fawn or light brown, like the coat of a young #deer (referred to as a 'fawn' regardless of its colour!), some authorities say that the common name comes not from the #brown colour of the #cap but from antler-like horn-shaped protrusions on apex of the gill-face #cystidia (known as pleurocystidia) that can be seen under a #microscope!
#fungioftheday #deershield #wood #gills #horns #deermushroom #toadstool #fungi #mushroom #nature #deadwood #mastodonmushrooms #mastodon #mastoart #mycodon #bracket #mosstodon #mycology #fungiverse #fungus #mushroomsofmastodon #nature
#fungifacts #mushrooms #plants #fungikingdom #mastodonmushroom -
Good #evening everyone 🌙
Todays #fungifind 🍄
Deer Shield / Mushroom! (Pluteus cervinus)
The Deer Shield is a #wood-rotting fungus that occurs mainly on hardwood #stumps. This fungus can appear at any time from late #spring through to late #autumn.
Although its caps are usually fawn or light brown, like the coat of a young #deer (referred to as a 'fawn' regardless of its colour!), some authorities say that the common name comes not from the #brown colour of the #cap but from antler-like horn-shaped protrusions on apex of the gill-face #cystidia (known as pleurocystidia) that can be seen under a #microscope!
#fungioftheday #deershield #wood #gills #horns #deermushroom #toadstool #fungi #mushroom #nature #deadwood #mastodonmushrooms #mastodon #mastoart #mycodon #bracket #mosstodon #mycology #fungiverse #fungus #mushroomsofmastodon #nature
#fungifacts #mushrooms #plants #fungikingdom #mastodonmushroom -
After a long steady climb from Dufton, near Appleby-in-Westmorland, the view opens up through High Cup Gill on the North Pennines.
Situated within the North Pennines AONB, this stunning u-shaped valley is thought to be glacial in origin.#England #outdoors #AONB #monochrome #landscape #photography
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From IMDb: Ricou Browning, a professional diver and swimmer, was required to hold his breath for up to 4 minutes at a time for his underwater role as the "Gill-man".
#creaturefromblacklagoon #richardcarlson #juliaadams #jackarnold #reelyoldmovies -
Good #evening everyone 🌙
Todays #fungifind 🍄
Deer Shield / Mushroom! (Pluteus cervinus)
The Deer Shield is a #wood-rotting fungus that occurs mainly on hardwood #stumps. This fungus can appear at any time from late #spring through to late #autumn.
Although its caps are usually fawn or light brown, like the coat of a young #deer (referred to as a 'fawn' regardless of its colour!), some authorities say that the common name comes not from the #brown colour of the #cap but from antler-like horn-shaped protrusions on apex of the gill-face #cystidia (known as pleurocystidia) that can be seen under a #microscope!
#fungioftheday #deershield #wood #gills #horns #deermushroom #toadstool #fungi #mushroom #nature #deadwood #mastodonmushrooms #mastodon #mastoart #mycodon #bracket #mosstodon #mycology #fungiverse #fungus #mushroomsofmastodon #nature
#fungifacts #mushrooms #plants #fungikingdom #mastodonmushroom -
Good #evening everyone 🌙
Todays #fungifind 🍄
Deer Shield / Mushroom! (Pluteus cervinus)
The Deer Shield is a #wood-rotting fungus that occurs mainly on hardwood #stumps. This fungus can appear at any time from late #spring through to late #autumn.
Although its caps are usually fawn or light brown, like the coat of a young #deer (referred to as a 'fawn' regardless of its colour!), some authorities say that the common name comes not from the #brown colour of the #cap but from antler-like horn-shaped protrusions on apex of the gill-face #cystidia (known as pleurocystidia) that can be seen under a #microscope!
#fungioftheday #deershield #wood #gills #horns #deermushroom #toadstool #fungi #mushroom #nature #deadwood #mastodonmushrooms #mastodon #mastoart #mycodon #bracket #mosstodon #mycology #fungiverse #fungus #mushroomsofmastodon #nature
#fungifacts #mushrooms #plants #fungikingdom #mastodonmushroom -
Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld
In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.
The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.
Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.
This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.
Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.
Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.
Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.
There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.
My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.
The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.
What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.
#books #campbell #comparision #culture #knowing #kripke #lies #meaning #myth #naming #sontag #stories #storytelling #truthtelling #voyager -
Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld
In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.
The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.
Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.
This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.
Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.
Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.
Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.
There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.
My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.
The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.
What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.
#books #campbell #comparision #culture #knowing #kripke #lies #meaning #myth #naming #sontag #stories #storytelling #truthtelling #voyager -
Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld
In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.
The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.
Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.
This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.
Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.
Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.
Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.
There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.
My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.
The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.
What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.
#books #campbell #comparision #culture #knowing #kripke #lies #meaning #myth #naming #sontag #stories #storytelling #truthtelling #voyager -
Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld
In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.
The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.
Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.
This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.
Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.
Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.
Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.
There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.
My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.
The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.
What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.
#books #campbell #comparision #culture #knowing #kripke #lies #meaning #myth #naming #sontag #stories #storytelling #truthtelling #voyager -
Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld
In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.
The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.
Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.
This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.
Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.
Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.
Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.
There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.
My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.
The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.
What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.
#books #campbell #comparision #culture #knowing #kripke #lies #meaning #myth #naming #sontag #stories #storytelling #truthtelling #voyager -
Manual of monsters from cinema and culture – Book Review
I found an advertisement somewhere online for Rue Morgue Magazine’s Monstro Bizarro collection, “An Essential Manual of Mysterious Monsters”. Maybe it was via the editor, Lyle Blackburn. I pay attention to Lyle’s books because I’ve liked them all so far but I’m not a Rue Morgue reader. This collection of columns looked interesting so I ordered it directly from Rue Morgue. (Later, I saw it on the shelf at BAM bookstore.)
At only 130 pages, I would quibble with the “manual of monsters” moniker but I enjoyed this book. I found that at the end of a stressful day, I was eager to get back to it.
I have a ton of cryptozoology and monster books. Most of the popular books on monsters repeat the same old tired anecdotal tales, complete with dramatic assumptions and error. I was pleasantly surprised to find this book generally did not do that. It focused on the movie and pop culture aspects of the monsters. You do not have to believe that these creatures are real monsters to enjoy this book, you just have to enjoy the idea, which I certainly do. Most of the contributions are from Lyle (by far the best ones). The rest were from Ken Gerhard, Nick Redfern, and David Weatherly.
The first 49 pages (Chapter 1) focused on Bigfoot and on the wave of horror films starring a violent version of the beast that came out within the last few years. This was a fresh view for me and I thought it was highly enjoyable to hear from the filmmakers on their vision of Bigfoot as “monster”. Here’s the thing: I won’t WATCH gory horror movies like this but I like finding out about the making of them. I certainly don’t begrudge people who like them or the crypto-fiction novels. Bigfoot and lake monsters, especially, make for fine fictional narratives.
All the “Boggy Creek” film efforts in one place.Chapter 2 included a mish-mash of creatures featuring Mothman and the wolf/dogman phenomenon. Chapter 3 was “slithery” things like lake and river monsters, the death worm, and half-human creatures like the Gill-man from the Black Lagoon and Lizardman. Chapter 4 was a sample of cryptids in pop culture. Chapter 5 were some of the stranger critters like Mokele-Mbembe, Shunka Warak’in, Momo and Kongamato. I think this chapter could have been wrapped into Chapters 2 and 3. As many monsters as possible were mentioned but, out of necessity, it was not comprehensive. The heavy use of illustrations made up for that.
While the organization was a bit odd and the content light fare to read, monster movie buffs will enjoy it. The artwork throughout the book was excellent. I could devour books just dedicated to images of monster toys and art. The film posters were awesome. I wish more were included. The cinema aspect is Rue Morgue‘s forte – it’s the perfect vehicle to explore this topic.
There were some places in the collection where it veered back into the standard cryptid fare (10 most famous creatures of cryptozoology, etc.) There were a number of these catch-all lists that covered a vast array of creatures but, generally, the heavy focus was on Bigfoot-type monsters. There was one particular stinker (“Proving Bigfoot”) because of its errors and mischaracterizations, while the rest were entertaining and new, even for a cryptid-veteran like me. I think, perhaps, this was because the rest of the content didn’t lean hard or at all on the “proof” aspect (which is where monster stories always tank).
At $15 for a paperback, it’s worth the price for the artwork alone. It makes for a nifty collectible for cryptozoology buffs.
#Bigfoot #BoggyCreek #filmMonsters #RueMorgue
https://sharonahill.com/?p=3756
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REFORM UK: Former Senedd MS Caroline Jones resigns citing candidate parachuting and “wall of silence”
Jones, 70, who represented South Wales West as a regional MS from 2016 to 2021, announced her resignation on social media, saying she had formally submitted her departure more than 24 hours before making it public and had received no response from the party.
In a lengthy statement, Jones said local members who had worked hard in their communities had been passed over for candidacies, with individuals she described as having “little or no connection” to constituencies being placed into positions instead. She said this had caused “deep frustration and disappointment” among members, candidates and supporters who had invested time and resources in good faith.
More seriously, she alleged that some of those parachuted into constituencies had brought “further reputational damage” through conduct including allegations of racism and discrimination — claims she said had embarrassed those who had worked to represent their communities with integrity.
“This continued lack of engagement reflects the wall of silence that many of us have experienced when trying to seek clarity and accountability,” Jones wrote, adding that she had made repeated formal attempts to get answers and had consistently been ignored.
The resignation adds to a growing picture of turmoil inside Reform UK’s Welsh operation in the weeks before the May 2026 Senedd election. Swansea Bay News has reported extensively on the party’s difficulties across the region, including the collapse of its Bridgend candidate slate, a furious resignation in Swansea in which a candidate branded the party a “sewer”, and a Carmarthenshire candidate launch overshadowed by wider defections and internal turbulence.
Jones is not a new face to Welsh political turbulence. She was first elected on the UKIP ticket in 2016, briefly led the UKIP Senedd group in 2018, and subsequently left to sit as an independent before joining the Brexit Party — now Reform UK — in 2019. She later broke with the group again over its anti-devolution stance, forming the Independent Alliance for Reform group in the Senedd until her seat ended at the 2021 election. She rejoined Reform UK in 2023.
Her resignation echoes complaints that have surfaced repeatedly across Wales. Candidate selection disputes, allegations of racism and discrimination against Reform figures in the region, and the high-profile jailing of former Wales leader Nathan Gill for ten and a half years over a Russian bribery case have collectively damaged the party’s credibility ahead of what polls suggest could be a significant electoral moment.
Jones said her decision was “about integrity, and about standing up for what is right”, and that she remained committed to serving veterans and her community.
It is not yet clear whether she intends to stand as an independent candidate at the Senedd election or step back from frontline politics.
Jones represented the South Wales West region, which covers Bridgend, Neath Port Talbot and Swansea — areas that have been among the most turbulent for the party’s Welsh operation.
The Senedd election takes place on 7 May 2026. Reform UK has not yet responded to the resignation.
Related stories from Swansea Bay News
Bridgend chaos: Three of Reform’s six Pen-y-bont Senedd candidates have quit — and nobody knows who’ll replace them
Three of Reform UK’s six Bridgend Senedd candidates quit ahead of the May 2026 election, leaving the party scrambling to fill its slate.Swansea Reform UK candidate quits in furious ‘betrayal’ rant — ‘Party has sunk into the sewer!’
A Reform UK Swansea candidate resigned with a furious public statement accusing the party of betrayal.Carmarthenshire: Reform UK names full Senedd slate — but defections cast shadow over campaign launch
Reform UK named its Carmarthenshire Senedd candidates, but the announcement was overshadowed by wider party turbulence and defections.Nigel Farage appoints new Reform Wales leader as Labour says party is now run by Tories
Nigel Farage appointed a new Reform UK Wales leader amid ongoing questions about the party’s direction in Wales.Former Reform UK Wales leader Nathan Gill jailed for 10 and a half years over Russian bribery
Nathan Gill, the former leader of Reform UK in Wales, was jailed for over a decade after being convicted of accepting Russian bribes.Plaid Cymru storms ahead as shock Senedd poll predicts political earthquake in Wales
#CarolineJones #featured #ReformUK #ReformWales #resignation #SeneddElection #SeneddElection2026 #SeneddElections2026
A major Senedd poll showed Plaid Cymru surging ahead, with significant implications for all parties including Reform UK.