Sphagnum

I had the pleasure today of spending two and a half hours in a Zoom conversation with Nick Land, post-postmodernist philosopher and occultist, the man who bridges the gap between Situationism and sorcery. Land, for those who haven't followed him, was the leading figure in CCRU, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which started out as an academic project at Warwick University, England, and promptly went zooming out into the far reaches, pursuing a splintered vision of reality which out-Cyberpunked the Cyberpunk movement in science fiction while simultaneously blending in great dollops of post-Marxist political economy, avant-garde philosophy, weird fiction, and occultism. These days Land's writings are extremely popular among Silicon Valley tech bros and the more abstruse end of the Chaos magic scene. 

It would be hard to find two serious occult thinkers these days whose ideas have less in common than Land and me. Fortunately both of us have the massively unfashionable habit  of being able to disagree without being a jerk about it, so we had a fine lively discussion that covered a great deal of ground, and we'll be doing another podcast conversation as soon as it's mutually convenient. Kudos to James Ellis of the Hermitix podcast, who got the ball rolling, and Michael Downs and Bryce Nance of The Dangerous Maybe podcast for making it happen. You can take it in on Youtube here. 

Last weekend I was in rural North Carolina giving a talk to a Masonic group there. As I commented at the time, most of the Southerners I know are very hospitable people, and so are most of the Masons I know; combine the two and hoo boy. It was very pleasant. During one of the intervals when the womenfolk were present, I was introduced to the wife of one of the brothers, who is also a writer. She didn't tell me that, and seemed embarrassed to have it brought up, but I'm glad that came up in the conversation.

Sharon K. Bradshaw (that's her name) is a preschool teacher, and her book, Rainbow Circle's Big Worry!, is for preschoolers.  It's got animals for characters, and it's short and well illustrated, the sort of thing that not-quite-beginning readers can pick their way through without too much difficulty and five- and six-year-olds can take in easily when it's read aloud. The reason I mention it here is that it's about listening. 

Ms. Bradshaw mentions in the foreword that she's asked her students, "What's the hardest thing about being a child?" (Not many adults would have the courage to ask that question, much less take in the answer.) The answer far more often than not was "Nobody listens to me." I'm not sure how many of you can relate, but I certainly can; having to deal with most of the issues I faced alone, without a single sympathetic person I could talk to, was one of the things that made my childhood a very bleak time. I wonder how many people remember Cat Stevens' song "Father and Son," with the son's harrowing lines: 

"How can I try to explain? When I do, he turns away again
That's what Rainbow Circle's Big Worry! is meant to address. Its overt purpose is to teach children to think of listening -- and the broader set of skills to which Ms. Bradshaw gives the name "attuning" -- as a valuable talent and a skill worth learning. I suspect that a covert purpose is to slip the same insight through to parents and other adult caregivers. On the off chance that my readers know children (or adults) who could benefit from this, I figured a signal boost was worth doing. 

You can get a copy from Bookshop and from all the other usual suspects.