[17 March 2024]: "Primitive Hypertext" — water witches and divining rods; obscene quackery; thoughtography; psychic surgery; sudanese jazz
water witches and divining rods; obscene quackery; thoughtography; psychic surgery; sudanese jazz
Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We say Bismillah to initiate an act to acknowledge the intention and the ethics we carry with all that follows Bismillah.
This is part of the newsletter's “Primitive Hypertext” (Octavia Estelle Butler) strand.
An annotated list of five things I’ve read/seen/heard and want to share. [weekly: every Sunday] Read more about the changes in the newsletter rhythm here.
Hiya!
Popping in quickly to say Ramadan Mubarak and leave a few links! I am in the middle of prepping for three solo exhibitions so I have been away from the newsletter, but I am back!
On to the primitive hypertext!!!
An invitation for me: What is a word or phrase connecting all five links?
***Scroll to the end to see where I landed***An invitation for you: What is another word or phrase connecting all five links?
Another invitation for you: Which of these links do you want to share with a friend?
I just listened to a podcast about pseudoscience in criminal investigations. Check out the podcast here (The Grave Detector). I am fascinated by pseudoscience not because of a desire to debunk it — I will leave that work up to others. I am interested because I am curious about the type of labor that goes into knowledge production concerning ideas deemed pseudoscience and the industry of predatory journals, cloaked URLs, and avoidance of specific scientific corroboration efforts. There is much money to be made from pseudoscience, and I am curious about that alongside the duration aspect of pseudoscience or what is the temporal gap between the introduction of a given scientific idea and when it is deemed “fake.”?
Willis, Matthew. Putting an End to Obscene Quackery. JSTOR Daily. January 15, 2024.
Let's spend even a few minutes online. I wonder if we can draw any parallels between influencers pushing dubious cures or products and early 19th-century “alternative healers” who were fully aware of their scamming. This story is a bit different: “In their efforts to control the practice of medicine, mid-Victorian era British doctors joined forces with anti-vice campaigners to censor publications about sex, reproduction, and sexual health. The doctors were targeting what they called “obscene quackery.” In the process, they helped create a censorship regime that affected what they themselves could publish about sexual health.”
I am reading High Static, Dead Lines Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter by Kristen Gallerneaux and came across something called thoughtography and went down quite a rabbit hole.
Cartwright, Gary. Touch Me, Feel Me, Heal Me!. Texas Monthly. December 1986.
Wikipedia describes psychic surgery as “a pseudoscientific medical fraud in which practitioners create the illusion of performing surgery with their bare hands and use sleight of hand, fake blood, and animal parts to convince the patient that diseased lesions have been removed and that the incision has spontaneously healed.”
Sharhabil Ahmed – The King Of Sudanese Jazz (2020)
An invitation for me: What is a word or phrase connecting all five links?
pseudoscience; alternative knowledge production; fringe; suspension of beliefAn invitation for you: What is another word or phrase connecting all five links?
Another invitation for you: Which of these links do you want to share with a friend?
Thank you for reading,
Kameelah 👽
Finally, while I do not organize my finances around paid newsletter subscriptions, wouldn’t it be cool if this wee little newsletter could allow me to take quarterly self-imposed writing retreats? Consider getting a one-year membership at $70 USD :)
How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL
love octavia butler and especially any reference to how she lived! she’s forever the coolest to me. the word that came up for me from your shares was “magic” :-))