Dansk Jävlarna

I am an Attendant of the Borgesian Circulating Depository. Duties: 1. honoring visionary ancients who were centuries or millennia before their time; 2. tilting the game board so as to cast everything in a new light; 3. celebrating allegory and metaphor as scenic shortcuts to wisdom; 4. discovering the macrocosm in the microcosm; 5. measuring non-material forces which nonetheless carry weight (Umberto Eco); 6. tracking extraordinary tempests in mundane teacups; 7. finding mystical analogues to scientific breakthroughs—putting the super into the natural, the other into the worldly, the meta into the physical, the para into the normal, the magical into realism; 8. puzzling over hidden, deeper meaning; 9. carrying the key, even when the lock has been lost; 10. identifying archetypes at play; 11. studying the legend, even when the map is blank; 12. searching through the deepest shadows for the bright light that cast them; 13. delving into the unfathomable in wordless awe of the inexplicable; 14. photographing background images for the insides of mystery boxes; 15. offering the inscrutable its due scrutiny; 16. endowing branches of Borgesian catacombs; 17. diagramming the sacred syllables in the mumbo jumbo; 18. believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast; 19. building 3D models of M.C. Escher's visual illusions; 20. crafting something out of nothing; 21. designing floor plans for memory palaces; 15. plundering cultural detritus; 16. bringing warmth to fuzzy logic; 17. looking through trompe l'oeil windows; 18. freeing radicals; 19. centering on marginalia; 20. navigating the ocean that roars within the seashell; 21. making the past perfect and the future less tense; 22. seeking a grand unification of hard science, soft science, and ethereal science; 23. resisting the belligerence of ignorance; 24. erecting signs on dotted lines; 25. taking a stand for poetic justice; 26. tracing constellations in the starry-eyed; 27. fighting to cure anhedonia; 28. getting in stitches over how many angels can dance on the point of a needle; 29. exploring intangible powers, from those celebrated by the world's great religions to square roots to the literary tradition (Umberto Eco); 30. directing good brain power to fanciful ends. "It is the custom here that we go just a little beyond, that we consider each direction with the possibilities of madness and its grand, all-inclusive theatrics, where even minor dreams are worth their weight in gold, when balanced against the darkness out of which they have gestated and taken their cues from the fiercest and loveliest of all the animals." —J. Karl Bogartte

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Vintage animal friends imagery.

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Separated at Birth?

Our custom widget that checks for duplicated images suggested this unlikely pairing. See the original post for photo source details.

Wondering about this post? Wait for the dissertation (TBA). For now: Weblog ◆ Books ◆ Videos ◆ Music ◆ Etsy

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It’s been said that we still have only the crudest understanding of ghosts. Here are a thousand vintage ghosts I’ve invited over.

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My modest collection of vintage autumn and falling leaves imagery.

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An homage to the singing busts of Disney's Haunted Mansion? The amazing multiinstrumentalist and vocalist Darius Greene gets the Grave Mood Rings treatment.

@ghostowlattic

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Playing cards dealt through time – my playing cards gallery.

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I’m collecting some weird, rare variants of Alice in Wonderland imagery.

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Uplifting: my modest collection of vintage flying horses.

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“He sat on an upturned box.”

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Das freie Zeichnen - 1925 - via University of Heidelberg

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Not exactly in Kansas: my collection of vintage Wizard of Oz imagery.

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“I suppose soon we’ll just have one word for everything.  Just different inflections.”

“I hate to think what the word will be.”

From Forced Perspectives by Tim Powers, 2020.

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Divine: my collection of vintage haloes is beatific.

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Some strange and unusual vintage diagrams.

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From pet umbrellas to magical umbrellas to weird giant ones, here's my umbrellas gallery.

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Here's looking at you: over 1,000 vintage "faces in things".