We’re coming to London to launch The Oort Cloud Review at the Camden Arts Centre on November 11, at 19:00. The event is free, but pre-registration is required. Copies of the OCR will be for sale at a reduced price. We expect you to attend.
Here is what to expect:
For its premiere UK event, the multi-armed creative project known as The Hinternet will bring together Justin Smith-Ruiu, Sam Jennings, and Sam Kriss for a discussion of their utterly uncategorisable collaborative work, The Oort Cloud Review. Is it a new “little magazine” on the scene? A metafictional experiment? Or did it simply arrive fully-formed in The Hinternet’s inbox through the mysterious new technology of “Inter-World Transfer Protocol” (IWTP)?
Justin, Sam, and Sam will go some way towards resolving these difficult questions, through selected readings, lively discussion, and, rumor has it, the presentation of a new trove of documents from the Heliopause Research Directorate, which may shed considerable light on what exactly is going on out there in the Oort Cloud.
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It is highly probable that there will be a separate OCR launch event, at the KGB Bar in New York, sometime between October 22 and 25. But we are still waiting for confirmation on that and so will not say anything more for now.
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The Hinternet Foundation’s current online fall course: Clavis: The Voynich Manuscript, the Riverbank Institute, and the Philosophical Origins of the American Military-Information-Technology Complex is going wonderfully. Just yesterday we had an amazing guest lecture from the renowned medieval codicologist and long-time Voynichologist Lisa Fagin Davis, in which she told us about some of her recent remarkable co-discoveries as to the manuscript’s probable origins. Next week we will be welcoming Princeton historian Jennifer Rampling, who will tell us about some of the possible alchemical resonances of the manuscript’s illustrations. It is, truly, an education.
You missed the chance to join us for Voynich, but you now have the opportunity to sign up for our next course offering, beginning November 1 and meeting weekly for the following seven Thursdays: The History and Philosophy of Astrobiology. This course will be co-led by Justin Smith-Ruiu, whom some of you will know, and Max Wade, a brilliant and youngish scholar, whose particular domain of expertise concerns Ancient Greek theories of the celestial intelligences. We have two objectives: first, to use both history and the latest scientific findings to go some way towards determining whether we are alone in the universe or not; second, to figure out the philosophical, cosmological, and cultural conditions that lay behind the permutations in Western history in the way intelligence beyond or “above” Earth is represented — now as inherent to the celestial bodies themselves; now as angels and archangels; and now again, from the 17th-century on, as organic beings, with limbs and viscera like our own. It is going to be, likewise, an education, and we will be thrilled to see you there.
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At some point we will have to stop listing things we are “thrilled” about. This is a state of the soul hardly conducive to getting work done, and as you can see we have our share to do.
Nonetheless, we admit we are thrilled at the news of Anne Carson’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Like Carson herself, we insist that we do not much care about contemporary literature, but only ever read sub specie aeternitatis. Like Carson, if you catch us reading, it is very unlikely to be a title first published this year. And like Carson, we disdain “writing advice” and have never in our lives thought to ask for it or give it.
We are not, in short, part of “LitStack”, so the news of Anne Carson’s prize places us in a bit of a bind: any celebration of it is at once an abandonment of our principled commitment to Carsonism. At the same time, we can only confess that we love her, and, more than that, that she is perhaps one of the two or three greatest inspirations for the work we do at our editorial offices in Quimper. If she dies before we do, it is very likely that we will conscript her as an “Eternal Editor”, and that she will take her place not only alongside László Krasznahorkai and Verner von Heidenstam (whom we’re certain LitStack has studied very carefully), but Isidore of Seville and Pliny the Elder too.
We were surprised, in going back over the past six years of our writing, to find that Carson only came up once, in an essay by JSR —one of our “faves”— of May, 2021. But some who know JSR personally might remember, from that time, his frequent ravings about what then appeared a serious intention to abandon his scholarly career. “To do what?” concerned friends predictably asked. “I don’t know… to be like Anne Carson,” was his unhinged reply. He was not of course thinking about Nobel Prizes… not even, at the time, for her. He was thinking about the fact that she, practically alone in our era, somehow traced an arc from scholarship, to poetry in the conventional sense, to full recovery of something like an archaic total art of poïesis. And that seemed, in the new monde à rebours we were only just entering five or so years ago, to be something worth emulating — if only in faint approximation of what she has been able to achieve. Unhinged, as we said. But that’s what love will do…
