ORCS ARE CREATURES FROM Tolkien, and specifically Tolkien, who created them as fantastic creatures of dread, and large numbers. Certainly, JRR Tolkien worked in veins of antiquarianism, and everything he wrote was a meta-reference to some Old English or Celtic or Norse forebear, as anyone who's got bored by his books knows, but the forebears of orc-dom in British, Irish, and Northern European myth are not the orcs of modern myth. Traditional goblins are solitary, intelligent, skilful, tricky. Hobgoblins are humorous, though the butt of the joke might be you. Elves will definitely steal your baby, and fairies will definitely trick you. Demons, though certainly folkloric, relate specifically to the rules of Christianity and formal religion. The orcdom of uncountable ugly barbarian numbers, who are enemies and only enemies, and who have been made massively popular in the Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer 40K games franchises, appear to arrive fresh, culturally whole, in the late 20th century. Or did they?
THE CITY OF SYDNEY Council proposes to nominate for State Heritage Register (SHR) listing a set of modern apartment blocks, including Ithaca Gardens in the Eastern Suburbs. Ithaca is a Harry Seidler apartment block and a landmark; the others are similar. All are covered already either by Heritage Conservation Areas or by some other form of protection. Listing on the State register would be an increase. I simply note that pthe language being used to oppose its inclusion in the SHR is almost exactly identical to that which might have been used in the 1970s in its favour. In the 1970s the heritage system in NSW was created as a response to excessively arbitrary Government power, threatening localism.
Carroll, the Ithaca Gardens owners’ corporation chair, voiced residents’ “overwhelming opposition” to local or state heritage listing at a council committee meeting last week.
“Ithaca Gardens is not a museum, a place of worship, an office tower or an individual residence – it is home to more than 60 people. Owners … love and respect the building,” he said.
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He said many of the apartments had been renovated internally to make them “more suitable for 21st-century living” and “to deny such rights to others would seem extremely unfair”.
Richard Jones, Soft Machines:
I agree with the Anglofuturists that we shouldn’t resign ourselves to our current economic failures. I think we need to ask ourselves what has gone wrong with the variety of capitalism that we have, that has led us to this stagnation. It’s a problem that’s not unique to the UK, but which seems to have affected the UK more seriously than most other developed countries. The slowdown seems to have begun in the 2000s, crystallising in full at the Global Financial Crisis.
Dave Karpf, UNCOUTH, 4 December 2024:
I have come to think of this as the hidden, unspoken ideology of our media and political elites. They behave, in word and in deed, as though what is most important is the protection and maintenance of the status hierarchy.
A thing is wrong and objectionable if it is uncouth — crass behavior that undermines faith in social institutions and the social order.
THIS USED TO BE a good blog, a food blog. What happened to that? I got a job, obviously, and the impetus to post food subsided. So here are the nori rolls I like to make on Fridays (in an exercise of quasi-Catholicism) after I go and get some fresh sashimi.
