CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
This haunted photograph appears in the Cape Cod Community College yearbook of 1968. Why are strange glows so ghostly? Such lights are perhaps manifestations of what Ross Chambers calls "flauntology." Chambers notes that when a metaphysical subject matter is inexplicable, to demonstrate or manifest that inexplicibility requires abstaining from any attempt to explain it away, with the aim to make hauntedness haunting and not to lay the ghosts; "to demonstrate or display without explanation is ... to flaunt .... [I]t is the flaunting of hauntedness that makes hauntedness haunting. If it is true that there is no ontology without a hauntology, it seems to be also the case that there can be no hauntology without a flauntology, since flaunting names the apodictic gesture, the act of relay, that, in causing hauntedness to be seen, makes it haunting. Flaunting is, par excellence, the gesture of visibility" whereby the lacking object can be figurally presented as an interpretive, recognizable object that haunts (Untimely Interventions).
[Inexplicable images from generations ago invite us to restore the lost
sense of immediacy. We follow the founder of the Theater of
Spontaneity, Jacob Moreno, who proposed stringing together "now and then
flashes" to unfetter illusion and let imagination run free. The images
we have collected for this series came at a tremendous price, which we explained previously.]
A spirit photograph is made even eerier by blocking out the faces of the sitters from the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, vol. 16 (1922). The caption reads: "The photograph by Mrs. Deane. (Faces of sitters obliterated.)"
[Inexplicable images from generations ago invite us to restore the lost
sense of immediacy. We follow the founder of the Theater of
Spontaneity, Jacob Moreno, who proposed stringing together "now and then
flashes" to unfetter illusion and let imagination run free. The images
we have collected for this series came at a tremendous price, which we explained previously.]
[Inexplicable images from generations ago invite us to restore the lost
sense of immediacy. We follow the founder of the Theater of
Spontaneity, Jacob Moreno, who proposed stringing together "now and then
flashes" to unfetter illusion and let imagination run free. The images
we have collected for this series came at a tremendous price, which we explained previously.]