The Liminalist # 130: Reading in Tongues (with Kelvin Gregory)

First of a two-part conversation with Kelvin Gregory, on shunning social media, the Alt. Perceptions Community margins, occult rituals, Morris Berman in Mexico, Jonathan Lethem,  languishing in development hell, Blood Poets, library electronic resources, James Howard Kunstler, finding a different kind of listener, getting back to old magic, erupting Mount Helens, a spontaneous astral projection, Freudian analysis, John Michael Greer, Crowley, wrestling with social engineering, Seen & Not Seen, Midnight Express & the Hollywood military complex,  Sebastian Horsley and the dungeons of Amsterdam, a photoshopped amputee photo, David Icke and Jimmy Savile, writing Seen & Not Seen and the genesis of “Occult Yorkshire,” Sebastian’s handlers, las maquiladoras in The Counselor, elite culture, Adler and the seven liberal arts, a culture vulture, an amphibian in academia, drawn to vernacular culture, the lunatic fringe vs. the intelligentsia, bridging the two worlds of high & low culture, reading in tongues, silencing the inner voice, socialization, sorcery and sorcerers, Greg Desilet & Taxi Driver, Plato and the regulation of the arts, movies as maps back to reality, who are the social engineers, anarcho-primitivism, growing up in the jungle, early impressions of nature, nomadic culture, romanticizing nature, the question of transcendence, ecstasy as out of body experience, a life without leisure time, knowledge as technology, when the inner guidance system gets hijacked.

Songs:  “The Kommema and his Religion”  by SunWalker; “I’m Falling” by Robyn Hitchcock;  “I Live Out of Time,” by Jeff Mistrali.

8 thoughts on “The Liminalist # 130: Reading in Tongues (with Kelvin Gregory)”

  1. Most of Berman’s recent publicity, what little of it there’s been, has focused on america specifically it seems. As much as i’d like to hear you podcast with him, it does sound like it wouldn’t work as well as either of you’d like, as i’m not sure how much time you’ve spent in USA. Nice episode as a fellow JMG, JHK fan who found you through them.

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  2. I was intrigued by your conversation with Kelvin, who, like me, may be one of your older listeners–older both in the sense of age and of enduring interest in your work. (We had a brief email exchange a couple of years ago, and though I haven’t been in touch or commented since, I’ve continued to follow your podcast.) Like Kelvin, I recall the Mount Saint Helen’s eruption, which happened in the spring of 1980, the year I graduated from college. When I heard him reference it, I thought he must be talking about some other, more recent, eruption. I ended up in Portland, Oregon, just a couple of months later and the city was still covered in ash. I too have an instinctive aversion to social media and a longtime interest in Morris Berman’s writing, among other parallel life experiences.

    One comment regarding your observation late in the discussion that hunter gatherers had to spend all their time laboring to acquire the necessities of life. There’s all sorts of research (for example, from anarchist anthropologist James Scott) indicating the exact opposite–that pre-agricultural peoples survived comfortably on much less daily labor, that theirs was a steady-stat economy, not dependent on surplus, and that our ultra-hierarchical, urbanized civilization–culture, if you will–has provided a host of creature comforts at the expense of human wholeness.

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    • Hi Charles. I will have to dig up that old email exchange (I assume you mean you & I?) to refresh my memory banks.

      I wasn’t meaning hunter-gatherers when I spoke of zero leisure time but people who live/d off the land/ran a farm. Not that I’ve done either, but I can well imagine the amount of work. Maybe winter would be a rest up time, provided you’d managed to store enough food and firewood to get you through it.

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      • Hi Jasun, Yes, a brief exchange about ritual sexual abuse and familial abuse. Along those lines, I’d be interested in your thoughts, in a podcast on writing, about parallels and (obvious ) differences between the Harvey Weinstein case and Jimmy Savile–especially in regards to how many enablers each of these guys had.

        I haven’t worked a farm (or been a hunter-gather) either, but I see your point about winter respite. I was thinking more about the transition from the hunter-gathers to agricultural society some 10,000 – 12,000 years ago and how that transformed everything about human relations.

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  3. An area of possible congruence between Jasun and Zerzan is Zerzan’s take on language and art as perhaps unnecessarily mediating experience/reality, an a allusion to non-verbal embodiment.

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