Once upon a time, a mighty race grew perplexed by its loneliness. The universe seemed pregnant with possibilities. Physical laws were suited to generate abundant stars, complex chemistry and life. Logic suggested that creation should teem with visitors and voices: but it did not.

This is the most beautiful poem I've stumbled across in years. I watched being read by Marianne Faithfull in “Gang of Souls” more times then I care to admit.

The human body is one of the most incredible organisms in the known universe, but all that awesomeness carries some pretty weird and hard-to-explain baggage.

This was written for publication in “Marihuana Reconsidered” (1971) under the pseudonym Mr. X. Sagan was in his mid-thirties at that time. He continued to use cannabis for the rest of his life. After his death the publisher, Lester Grinspoon, revealed the identity of Mr. X.

He first caught the scent that something was off as an economics student in India, wondering why, despite his mastery of the mathematics and technology of the discipline, the logic always escaped him. Then one day he had an epiphany: the whole thing was “cockeyed from start to finish.” To his amazement, his best teachers agreed. “Then why are we studying economics?” demanded the pupil. “To protect ourselves from the lies of economists,” replied the great economist Joan Robinson.

Wendell Berry, a quiet and humble man, has become an outspoken advocate for revolution. He urges immediate action as he mourns how America has turned its back on the land and rejected Jeffersonian principles of respect for the environment and sustainable agriculture. Berry warns, “People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped; by influence, by power, by us.” In a rare television interview, this visionary, author, and farmer discusses a sensible, but no-compromise plan to save the Earth.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.

So here I was again: a Luddite, a Nimby, a reactionary, a romantic; standing in the way of progress. I realised that I was dealing with environmentalists with no attachment to any actual environment. People I had thought were on my side were arguing aggressively for the industrialising of wild places in the name of human desire.

Written during the run-up to World War Two. Jeffers saw the coming war as inevitable, tragic and world-changing. He believed it would be a disaster, but he also knew he could do nothing to stop it.

How should I live? And what is worthwhile? I ask these questions one cold April morning when I am feeling particularly dark and gloomy, forbidding and unapproachable.

I walk the dirt trails, admire the scenery, breathe in the fresh air, ogle at the mounds of fresh, home-cooked food served in the communal dining hall and can't help but feel envious. It feels a bit like summer camp, year-round. But after a few days of exploring Twin Oaks and talking to its members – current and past – I begin to see an underbelly to this idyllic haven. In a way, life here isn't so different from life on the “outside:” It, too, can get complicated.

Canada is independent of England, isn’t it? I think so. Not a bad society. Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don’t have. They didn’t fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England? In the year before those famous shots were fired, farmers in Western Massachusetts had driven the British government out without firing a single shot. They had assembled by the thousands and thousands around courthouses and colonial offices and they had just taken over and they said goodbye to the British officials. It was a nonviolent revolution that took place.

To Confucius it seemed much better to be human-hearted than righteous, and to the great Taoists, Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, it was obvious that one could not be right without also being wrong, because the two were as inseparable as back and front. As Chuang-tzu said, “Those who would have good government without its correlative misrule, and right without its correlative wrong, do not understand the principles of the universe.”

When the glamour of one's marriage wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. Someone whom they might indeed very profitably have married.

If you believe in the real underground of Rock 'N' Roll, then now is the time to do something about it. The time is now to overthrow the current situations and declare war on the record companies, radio stations, publications, clubs, and anyone who promotes the whole so called “scene” as it now stands. We need to destroy it all and take it back from the corporate phonies and conformist. But action must be taken now and blood must be spilled.

“How many of you know how to watch television?” I asked my class one day. After a few bewildered and silent moments, slowly, one by one, everyone haltingly raised their hands. We soon acknowledged that we were all “experts,” as Harold Garfinkel would say, in the practice of “watching television.”

On the floor of one cavern, officers discovered an ominous metal container. The object was fat, festooned with wires. The police called in the bomb squad, they evacuated the surface, they asked themselves, What have we found? They had found a couscous maker.

An extraterrestrial robot and spaceship has just landed on earth. The robot steps out of the spaceship. “I come in peace,” it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, “take me to your Lizard.”

Part of the mythology of science is that cogent thinking equals scientific thinking, and that therefore anything that science rejects is likely founded on shoddy reasoning, poor observation, self-delusion, or perhaps outright fraud. This belief depends on two assumptions: that the Scientific Method is superior to other sources of knowledge, and that the institution of science honestly upholds and applies the Scientific Method. Granting all that, we can draw a convenient line in accepting or rejecting new ideas by asking, “Is this idea consistent with accepted science? But what if these assumptions are not true?

I still get asked with appalling regularity “where my ideas come from.” Here's the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information. Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes.

The Western comics industry is scattered, unfocussed, badly confused. Such periods are optimum for violent revolution. The Old Bastard says sharpen your axes, make your peace and pack your Rohypnol; we're going on a road trip to reclaim the comics industry and remake it in another image.

Steampunk is funereal theater. It's a pageant. A pageant selectively pumps some life into the parts of the past that can excite us, such as the dandified gear of aristocrats, peculiar brass gadgets, rather stilted personal relationships and elaborate and slightly kinky underwear. Pageants repress the aspects of the past that are dark, gloomy, ugly, foul, shameful and catastrophic. But when you raise the dead, they bring their baggage.