From May 31 to June 2, both of our books are free:
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Tag: Vulcan
COMING SOON: Cogs Rate Gods
GABBLER: The Narrator and I will be selecting one deity per post to examine and rate base don a 0-5 star rating. The criteria we use for the scale is subject to change and Their ability to smite us. We’ll be starting with Vulcan. Big daddy V.
BLA: Oh, so it’s OK for you to call Him that but not me in my own book?
GABBLER: I’m hoping it will soften the blow because we ALL know how you’re going to rate Him… But back to the audience: Let us know if you want us two “Cogs in the Machine” to cover a specific divinity in the comments below or send me a tweet at @Circofootnotes. There’s no set schedule yet, but you can subscribe to this blog to never miss a post!
BLA: This should really be a podcast. Everyone has a podcast.
GABBLER: You literally don’t speak, though. How would that work?
BLA: I could get a robot voice or something to read what I’m typing.
GABBLER: Great, another thing for me to edit… Let’s just see how this goes first.
BLA: I’m already regretting this.
GABBLER: Stay tuned!
Who needs Reading Rainbow when you have Reading Volcano?
On automata and statues:
‘Our imaginary identification with so alien a creature as a moving statue or an automaton can be profoundly satisfying, partly because that identification may spare us diverse anxieties about our place in the world, in our own bodies, about the proper location of the human. The freedom entailed by that identification lies not just in the idea of a turn against the blockage or oblivious figured by the stone, but in the fact that the living statues, for all its motion, yet tends to remain a statue, untroubled and unselfconscious (or at least we hope it does). Yet if the living statues does not disappoint us by becoming all too human (as Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle disappoints her “creator”), the fiction of animation is also likely to remind us of how alien and how disruptive of what we think of as the human are our vital energies, how catastrophic, petrifying, or mechanistic a form the entry into life can assume. Indeed, it suggest the ways in which the fantasy of the animated statue may constitute an implicit critique of our optimistic pictures of human desire, and of our wish that desire and the human could peacefully occupy the same space. The living statue may remind us that there is never any fixed space between.’
‘…Placing the question about the consciousness of stones thus in relation to the automaton fantasy, it starts to seem as if the desire to invite the inanimate into the space of the human conceals or mirrors a desire to push the human into a space of the inanimate. The face of objects granted a more than ordinary life becomes the face of Medusa.’
From The Dream of the Moving Statue by Kenneth Gross
