Jun 13, 2024 08:03 PM
https://lithub.com/in-praise-of-the-para...of-cranks/
EXCERPT: . . . Paranormal thinking can be defined as a discipline, a method, and a perspective, but also—and this isn’t emphasized enough—as a literary style.
Charles Fort may have posited himself as a modern day Diogenes, but before anything he was a writer, and a writer who conceived of an entirely novel genre at that.
All the hallmarks of the paranormal mode are evident in Fort, manifesting like ectoplasm before the participants in a séance. The desire to see connections between disparate events, the baroque establishment of often contradictory explanations, the democratic distrust of authority.
As much as an epistemological perspective, the paranormal is a prose style, a way of thinking about and explaining that which is inexplicable... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: . . . Paranormal thinking can be defined as a discipline, a method, and a perspective, but also—and this isn’t emphasized enough—as a literary style.
Charles Fort may have posited himself as a modern day Diogenes, but before anything he was a writer, and a writer who conceived of an entirely novel genre at that.
All the hallmarks of the paranormal mode are evident in Fort, manifesting like ectoplasm before the participants in a séance. The desire to see connections between disparate events, the baroque establishment of often contradictory explanations, the democratic distrust of authority.
As much as an epistemological perspective, the paranormal is a prose style, a way of thinking about and explaining that which is inexplicable... (MORE - details)
