hybrid Humanities – Ben Cullen

On the anniversary of the untimely and sudden death of Ben Cullen in 1995. [Link] [Link] [Link] Ben Cullen thought beyond conventional distinctions under a fresh evolutionary notion of humanity as deeply hybrid – material and immaterial, personhood and artifact, species and thing. Humanity: an undecidable, in Derrida’s sense. The lens through which he approached…

Olivier – Le sombre abîme du temps

Laurent Olivier’s wonderful book Le sombre abîme du temps has just appeared in translation (as The dark abyss of time: memory and archaeology) – [Link] Laurent offers profound elaboration of the fundamental insight that the past is all around us, before us, in material traces, that presence is filled with the past, that the future…

spectral stone

The Coquet Valley in Northumberland is fascinating me. [Link] Around Lordenshaws, across from the market town of Rothbury, are many carved rock surfaces, typically associated with farming communities from the fourth to and millennia BCE, maybe earlier and maybe later. Birky Hill I met Stan Beckensall, school teacher in Rothbury, rock art enthusiast, some thirty…