You look old

ITEM
Republican precedent

The Day They Killed the King by Hugh Ross Williamson (Macmillan, 1957). Gotta have a roadmap.

A favourite Weird England trope - not that you hear much about it, because it’s reactionary and Christian instead of progressive and pagan - is the bizarre Anglo-Catholic sub-tradition which believes Charles I (the best ever king of England, if you think about it) is a martyr and saint, because of the way he tried to protect the admin rights of bishops during the English revolution. 

Scarce as they are, Kings and Saints are the last superbeings left: post-mortem post-humans with special magic powers and a hotline to god. So Charles, who was crowned, then uncrowned, then been on a slow and bumpy road to near sainthood, is an interesting case. Hugh Ross Williamson’s painstaking, moment-by-moment account of his final days is detailed and sympathetic enough to be a pilgrim’s blueprint, a stations of the cross for infinitely zealous jacobites.

But Charles Stuart filled England’s ditches with blood, and HRW, to his credit, is ultimately too impressed by the dignity before the scaffold of regicide Thomas Harrison - who stands as the true hero of the piece, deserving better garlands than he got.

HRW struggles with Cromwell, cast as a remote but resolute manipulator and villain. Not that the capotain doesn’t fit, but by keeping him shadowy and unknowable England’s revolution is too easily dismissed as mad injustice, an unimportant aberration from the right rule of things, rather than an inevitability, a necessity, or the product of the forces of its moment.

Cromwell emerges as his most human and his most guignol at the same time: placing his hand into the gap between Charles’ head and shoulders, feeling the meat of the neck with his fingers, to assure himself the impossible thing had really happened.

ITEM
Andrew and Steven, Those Amusing Brothers.

ITEM
MINDLESS EXPLORATION - Gateway City, Absolute Wonder Woman #1-5 (Hayden Sherman, Kelly Thompson, Jordie Bellaire, 2024 - 2025) 

It’s right there in the first page: this comic is a guide to Gateway City. Like any useful portal, the first thing this gateway does is open.

You catch glimpses of Gateway City as-advertised after that, lurking in the corner of the page, a wall of bright tall buildings commanding the sea. For the most part, though, it looks a lot like the other major location of this story - the underworld. 

In part, this comes through in Hayden Sherman’s linework, which has a uncannily organic look to it whether it’s depicting huge, fuck-off monsters, hellbound landscapes, or packed meeting rooms. This effect is furthered by Jodie Bellaire’s red-grey colour palette, and by the threats that come our way through the page. As Tegan O’Neill highlighted in her review, making Wonder Woman a “refugee of hell” and pitting her against forces that move with the dread mass of deadly weather goes some way to placing Gateway City in both history and the world, uniting Gateway and destination, if you will. The comic’s response to this is hopeful on the face of it. Morrisonian even, in the case of the big address Wonder Woman gives to the city in issue #3:

But note the hint of harrowed transformation even here, in a speech against the call to death that’s about to boom out of the page, through the portal and into the world. “Kindness and compassion will save us all,” she says, and we are shown that the city is more willing to believe her than it might have expected. But the city (and the world?) may also witness this Wonder Woman’s capacity to wreak unfathomable change and believe in other, more brutal possibilities as well.    

ITEM
Small Acts of Magickal Resistance: Pagans Against AI
Generative AI is pushed by the worst people in the world. Billionaires who want art replaced by content. Use magick to destabilise the bastards.

Name: REXHEXREX  Attribution: The Crown

Purpose: This servitor will strengthen any legal action against Generative AI companies. REXHEXREX encourages the law to prioritise human creators in rulings. REXHEXREX agitates investors in Generative AI encouraging them to withdraw their funding and support.

Colours: Purple/Green/Silver/Gold Smells: Rosemary/Frankincense/LimeTarot Cards: Emperor/Empress King of Swords/Queen of PentaclesSeven of Swords/Three of Pentacles. Sounds: Music that announces ‘I am coming’or ‘I am here’. Repetitive insistent beats. Music that builds and breaks into trumpets. Martial. Funk.

Servitors: Aetheric entities created to perform particular tasks. You can perform rituals to add to their power and/or call them to your or others aid.

Adding to their power: 1) Set the mood. You may wish to use the colours, smells, sounds and cards associated with the entity. 2) Clear your space. 3) Banish. The LBRP or Starry Cross are popular methods 4) State your intent ‘It is my will to empower REXHEXREX for its mission to...’ 5) Energise yourself. Use breathing, visualisation, movement to build up a core of energy within you. You may wish to dance. You may wish to laugh. Please yourself. 6) At the moment of peak, at the moment of no mind that is all mind visualise the entity before you and give your energy to it. 7) Calm yourself. 8) Banish again. 9) Ground yourself. 10) Later, but soon, do something sympathetic to the intentions of the entity.

Calling on them:  You can call on them anytime, anywhere anyhow, just use their name. If there is something specific you wish to ask of them then using these ritual techniques but incorporating your request will work. Have fun. Be safe.

ITEM
EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING I

(The Immortal Thor #11, Ewing/Pinti)

Hello readers, wouldn’t YOU, like Ossian - who may or may not have existed, care to be a WARRIOR POET; yes, yes you would, I thought so.

Timely ‘cos as you may have noticed last year, the world’s greatest poetry SHOWDOWN took place – and the goodies won, hurray: it was the only good news this decade. 

Drake is over, he’s cooked; gaslight on peep. ~ Wakanda flame emoji ~

Timely ‘cos the darkling prince of story (which dreams don’t really resemble unless you are a genius like David Lynch, not simply an endorsing motherfucker whom I don’t even like & whose pullquotes I can’t wait to never, ever see again) turnt out to be a rapine predator, and Sandman was a neurolinguistic programming trap to transform unwary lost girls from Delight to Delirium, have a big look if you really want to make yourself sick. I won’t ever again, he’s cooked & fuck him.

One of my favourite novels is The Savage Detectives (Roberto Bolaňo, 1998) - I would contend he is not, strictly, a novelist, that these are largely vignettes of his contemporaries but the essence of it is that everyone involved is a poet - very latinate, and something no Anglo unless they are literally published as one calls themselves. Congratulations buddy, you’re signed up to the visceral realists too… just by reading this!

So but what do you want to be a poet OF…? That’s the real question, and this is what I would encourage everyone reading to do, to find their own iconography, to look at bigger pictures - the biggest! Tectonic concepts, get inside them… every time you think of a box, put another box around it… apophenia - and out-think Large Language Models; let’s all be extremely self-realised 6 dimensional butterflies, emerging into a supercontext and let them hear the sound of YOUR wings.