ˇ B I E N V E N I D O !
W I L L K O M M E N !
B I E N V E N U E ! B E N V E N U T O ! B O A V I N D A !
You
have found your way to "The Best of Magellan's Log: Beauty, etc." |
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Special Issues: Chiliastic Hideon Copyright © "Giving well is the best revenge." All Issues: |
 Cole paintings. Thomas Cole, with music. Pretty is as pretty does. Take 10 Turner paintings. Combine them with 10 pretty good midi's, and give your eyes and ears a treat.
The Discriminating Mind
The Texas
Zen Hymnbook.
Alleviate despair. We love to get mail from our readers!
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Confusing Entanglements
The Texas Tao.
The Helios Cycle
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Montages de l'Empire. 25 good ol' American songs, plus 25 good ol' American collages = a purty good summary of where we've been, where we are, and where we're headed. Les Heures du Mal. The 15th
century had its "books of hours." Now the 21st century has one.
Myra Breckinridge. Before George Washington was, Myra is. Myra of such insights as, "Nothing is what it seems, and what nothing seems is false." To which we can only add, "Myra lives, Myra lives." Chiliastic Hideon. A very
special page (with its own logo yet) where we put stuff that for one reason or the other
doesn't fit anywhere else. Given the strangeness of "anywhere else" in this
magazine, you can imagine that we're talking here about material that is well beyond fear
and trembling, not to mention being and nothingness.
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Lost Worlds
The
Bad Midi Jukebox. There are good midi's, there are interesting midi's, 
SALTLICK.
Douglas Milburn takes us on a mind trip, using good words from across the ages to get at a
certain stillness which, he argues, we all carry with us all the time but which we often
forget about. It's a turn-of-the-millennium approach to meditation that we haven't seen
the likes of anywhere: 
Against my
best money-making advice, staff members persist in occasional outbursts of what they refer
to as "p----y" (even they can't call it by name). I keep telling them: The
path to penury is paved with p----y. Do they listen? No. All I can do is alert
the unwary reader with the little death's head, which in this context means: Warning!
P----y Ahead! 
How Soon?
Nothing is what it seems, and what nothing seems is false. --Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge. |
| After
three years Magellan’s Log is nearing what seems to be a state of completion, if such
a large, variegated structure can ever be said to be complete. From the beginning, as I’ve said elsewhere, I thought of the undertaking in architectural terms: a place (it is after all a "site") occupied by a large building or a group of buildings, a cyber-compound if you like, of various sizes, styles, and purposes. That metaphor still holds, but lately I’ve also begun to think of it as a tapestry, after the Renaissance model, full of detail and imagery, many smaller stories converging on one larger narrative. Given the stated editorial stance ("culture—counterculture—anti-culture"), the narrative turned out to be quite a bit more complex than I expected at the start. Though I wanted to do both the serious and the silly, I was more than once overtaken by events and wound up with more-—and more cutting—satire than I expected. As the turn-of-the-millennium world became yinner, I found myself becoming yanger, and vice-versa. The serious stuff is quite serious, the silly stuff quite silly, and the satire, well, the satire strove ever more mightily to follow the dark path of wisdom through ridicule where few show the way as directly as Dean Swift. Magellan’s Log, in this state of near-completion, is now yours for the wandering. Whether you see it as architecture or tapestry or just another web site really doesn’t matter. What matters here, as in the world, far more often than we want to admit, is serendipity. Wander, please, explore the nooks, the crannies, the crevices, the hopefully lovely small chambers, the occasional vast hall, and now and then the carefully plotted distant vista that opens through the occasional aural or visual window. I will no doubt make additions (and emendations), which will be duly entered in the "What’s New" page, but no more new issues, I think. Fifty-eight is just enough. Access is easy. Use the categories at the top of the page. Go to the various issues directly to the left. Or immerse yourself in the site search engine at the bottom. May the goddess of serendipity smile on you in your walks through Magellan’s Log as often as she did on me in the making of it. --Douglas Milburn Houston, July 2002. |
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