In researching for the recent Blake Society meeting on Blake and Blade Runner I discovered aspects of the film and Philip K Dick’s original story that radically change our understanding of the story and bring it more closely into line with Blake’s core vision.
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John Higgs’s new book promises a contemporary take on the works of William Blake, making them relevant to a modern audience generally, and to the counterculture in particular. So, how well does it live up to its promise?
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The topic of art and revolution deserves a much better book than John Molyneux’s The Dialectics of Art. This critical review explains why.
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What did Blake meantby saying that when he looked at the sun he saw a choir of angels singing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’, and how does it relate to his depiction of apocalypse.
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The film Blade Runner is hugely successful, but what does it mean? As the makers hint, the key is to watch it through the eyes of William Blake and his mythology of liberation.
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While A L Morton thought Blake may have read the work of the Ranter, Abiezer Coppe, modern historians say there is no evidence of Blake being familiar with Ranter texts. How much do Blake’s ideas overlap with The Ranters? I look at the Justification of the Mad Crew (1650) to compare.
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In the wake of the attempted QAnon putsch, and in the run-up to the inauguration of Joe Biden, when Trump’s supporters are expected to take to the streets again, Aleks McHugh considers QAnon hysteria and social media generally as incarnations of Meyrink’s Golem, as portrayed in the 1920 film by Paul Wegener.
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An analysis of the recently discovered engravings by Serge Arnoux illustrating William Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’, with a discussion of surrealism and Blake, and the impact of Moravianism on Blake’s idea of faith, sexuality, freedom and religion.
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Hauntology is a dying art. Haha. I’m not familiar with the social theory of the hauntologist. I just like the atmosphere. I wonder if to study haunting, really study it, one has to be a ghost oneself. Study haunting first-hand. Like
seeing from the future. A ghost in the cobweb-filled corridors. Play on the old piano, rattle some armor. Know all the
secret passageways, where lost treasures are waiting
Excerpted from the book Faust: Stretch Out Time, an essay about how great music helps us escape Urizenic time, dead time. “Out of time, into space” (William Burroughs)
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We are told that alchemy arrived in ‘Latin Europe’ on Friday, the 11th February 1144, when Robert of Chester completed his translation of De Compositione Alchemiae. This manuscript allegedly consists of the teachings of the monk ‘Morienus’, as given to the Umayyid Prince Khalid ibn Yazid. According to legend, this shadowy figure assists Khalid in deciphering a cryptic manuscript describing the making of the philosopher’s stone, and then disappears into the desert.
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A chapter from Ben Watson’s book, Blake in Cambridge. Ben Watson: Blake in Cambridge...
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