advancements on the road, courtesy of desultorie

These are both in a category that I adore but other art and literary critics may well still scorn, in terms of visual influences and ancestry; nonetheless, as far as I am concerned, they take us a long way towards that hybrid genre I have been longing for. And there are more being made each day, of course, ones whose ancestry can be traced to Sebald and the Surrealists as much as to Myst and its inheritors. (Not to diss Myst, which I reviewed seriously when it put in its ancestral appearance many years ago.) Probably there have been pieces already put online in born magazine that fit my criteria, I just haven't had time to go through the archives thereof. Thanks, desultorie.







http://www.cobwebforest.com/cobwebcontents.html

http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/bewild/bewild.htm

a quick note, asking for my speculation to be shot down immediately

Looking quickly at the two sites cited by desultorie, I am, once again, struck by the durability of Victorian imagery and the stuff of myth in the postmodern era (which I still call it because whatever it is, it ain't what we used to proudly call "modern"). I have long insisted that even as gender identities and traditional social roles shift (perhaps because they shift), the dated, the discarded, the archaic, the randomly found --- all remain the ground for imagination.

And when it all works, as longtime readers of this blog know from the other blogs through which they found this one, the materials overcome the sense of sticky cuteness within which commerce still attempts to embed them, and become something else entirely.

I continue to maintain that we need an interdiscipinary, cross-genre history of the alternative imagination, one that will do justice to the many overlapping but not identical motives out of which such acts of imagination spring.

I would add the work of Kate Kretz to that alternative world, just because it bears so little resemblance to the world of the sites desultorie pointed us to, but also bears little resemblance to the currently approved model for conducting an art career. Her latest post is here:
http://katekretz.blogspot.com/

I also see from the overlap of topics here that it will be difficult to separate out what belongs on joculum and what belongs on counterforces.blogspot.com, but I'll get that worked out eventually.