Counterforces and Other Little Jokes

In another time of political and economic apocalypse, there was a novel that dreamed, if only dreamed, of an alternative to the schemes of instrumental corporate reason:

http://www.hyperarts.com/thomas-pynchon/gravitys-rainbow/extra/counterforce.html

My counterforces.blogspot.com has turned out to be much less about alternatives in the art world than I had intended, and now that it has gotten the critics' award for Best Visual Art Writing Online from Creative Loafing's Best of Atlanta 2008 I am having to go back to writing things on it.

LJ Friends will be happy not to have my two thousand words clogging up their inboxes, I'm sure.

People who type in counterforce.blogspot.com instead of counterforces.blogspot.com will get a very big surprise. Sort of a little joke I didn't set up but was delighted by when I discovered it.

millennial dreams and nightmares

Norman Cohn's half-century-old The Pursuit of the Millennium is a less tendentious guide to the visions of the preterite than is Ernst Bloch's even older study The Principle of Hope, but regardless of the source text used to access the information, I am always amazed at how predictably the dialectic between hope, rage, and despair plays out in century upon century.

Perhaps someday the cry of triumphalism in the sacred harp hymn "Babylon Is Fallen" of which crowleycrow provides a later verse will be borne out in more than sacred harp singing, but now that Rodger Cunningham has brought it up by publicizing the second verse (or third, in some versions), I remember the shock with which I heard Hickory Wind perform the first verse on their 1974 LP:

Hail the day so long expected, hail the day of full release.
Zion's walls are now erected, and the watchmen publish peace.
From the distant hills of Zion, hear the trumpet loudly roar,
Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, Babylon is fallen to rise no more.

---Which is probably not the version on Hickory Wind's LP, which I haven't listened to in decades. What I find most interesting is the degree of variation in the biblical references and the variety of out-groups who have incorporated it into their hymnody.