The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

This started off as the September book-blog based on Bihani Sarkar's Heroic Shaktism , then expanded to a two-month book-blog riffing on Banerjee and Wouters'  Subaltern Studies 2.0. Then it became neither, because I didn't enjoy either book that much even if the ideas were in theory interesting. (The whole post will probably be enhanced if you read Bret Devereaux' Practical Polytheism series first) When was the last time your PCs sacrificed to a god? If you're anything like me, the answer is 'never'. In my experience of playing, watching, running and reading a fair number of games, the interactions with divinity I tend to see are: The PC is a 'prophet' class, including D&Dalike Clerics/Priests/whatever, with direct and reliable access to divinity - either for chats or just for powers The PC otherwise has a conversation with a sympathetic or antagonistic god which wants them to do something or wants to reward them for having done something (Exal...

This month's book is both spoilable and utterly not so, and I can't even really explain what I mean by that. Suffice to say that much of the plot is tales within tales, and the physical, psychological and narrative realities are often going in quite different directions. All that said, unmarked spoilers for this and also one significant spoiler for Brideshead Revisited ahead, but honestly I don't think 'spoilers' could spoil the actual experience of either of those books really. The covers of this book simply DO NOT MISS - my copy's the top left one, which is understated but very beautifully done. Review The first half or so of The Magus made me go 'I'm going to need to read a fucking journal's worth of critical reviews after this in order to understand it, aren't I?' This wasn't for lack of engagement - the main character starts in a very normal world, a sort of post- Brideshead Revisited witty satire of the dullness of Life After Oxfor...

Squeaking in under the wire of not being two months behind... N.B. this was originally going to be a double-feature w/August - I forgot to change the title before posting, silly me! fixed now. August book-blog forthcoming. July Book Review: Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality Technic and Magic , by Federico Campagna, is a marvellous rare bird - the book of metaphysical speculation that is reasonably well-written, comprehensible for laypeople,  and attempts to make definite suggestions for how to live on the basis of its outline. Campagna even describes it at one point as being self-help adjacent, which I think is not wholly inaccurate - it falls a little short on practical vision, but nobody's perfect. I think you should probably read it. I will now snipe at it for several hundred words.  Also the cover is amazing It has been noted that explaining something to others is one of the surest signs you've understood it, so let's give this a shot: We live under a sys...

Please note: this post's a bit incoherent. It's been rushed out around the schedule of writing the game, which has taken way too long. DTW is a good history. It starts with a rigorous methodological discussion, starting from the merits of history as a discipline and building out to define the terms of its analysis: examining terrorism's effects along a schema of strategic and tactical successes which looks like this: '1. Strategic victory, with the achievement of a central, primary goal or goals 2. Partial strategic victory, in which:     (a) One partially achieve ones' central, primary goal(s)     (b) One achieved or partially achieved one's secondary ... strategic goal(s)     (c) One determined the agenda, thereby preventing one's opponent from securing victory 3. Tactical success, in terms of:   (a) Operational successes      (b) The securing of interim concessions.     (c) The acquisition of publicity     (d) The ...

 Giovanni Arrighi's  The Long 20th Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times is a book in the tradition of World-Systems Theory and economics (of the broadly Marxian lineage), chronicling how cycles of capitalist development have shaped economic and political structures over the six centuries prior to its 1994 original release. I didn't love it as a book, but hoo boy has it given me an idea. Post should be about 40 mins if you read it all, though a lot of the mechanics are probably skimmable unless you're using them in play. In a first for the book-blogs, this isn't the edition I read (the reprinted 2010 version with a Currier and Ives printing of the Brooklyn Bridge ) but the abstract Paul Klee art of the original cover fits the rather cosmic topic of this post better  Arrighi argues at considerable and sometimes exhausting length - the book is quite dry - that there have been four great cycles in the growth of capital and the capitalist world-system. In each...