Tales of History and Imagination
Episodes
Friday May 21, 2021
Jack Parsons - Babalon‘s Rocketeer (Part One)
Friday May 21, 2021
Friday May 21, 2021
Content warning! I discuss a violent death in this Tale, and allude to another.
When John Whiteside Parsons – Jack to his friends – died suddenly in an explosion, one may have expected platitudes to the man. As a pioneering rocket scientist, the world - and the future would owe much to his innovations. Instead, all anyone could talk about was the gossip about his lifestyle – and membership to a cult which worshipped a man known as ‘The Great Beast'
Over the next two episodes, we're talking about the mad life of Jack Parsons – Rocketeer, Occultist...... Spy?
You can read the episode here.I also mention the Prelude written in the blog, here. And, of course Tipu's Tiger.
Please leave me like, give us a follow. Share the channel – it helps Tales grow. I post a new episode every fortnight, Wednesday night New Zealand time.
My Patreon, soon to be active can be found here
You can follow Tales of History and Imagination on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. I also write a weekly Wordpress Blog.
Music, writing, narration, mixing all yours truly. Sound FX a single explosion, marked ‘Sound 1000’.
I read Strange Angel by George Pendle, Sex and Rockets, the Occult World of Jack Parsons by John Carter and Robert Anton Wilson, watched several YouTube videos on Crowley's Gnostic Mass (Liber XV) – which was so far from what I expected it to be... referred to a couple of LA Times articles (Paywalled) about Clifford Clinton, his Clifton's Cafes, Frank L. Shaw, and the LA Mafia in the 1920s and 30s, over a year ago....that which I ramble through in the middle of the episode (and write about in the prologue) is from my notes on those articles, in my big red book of ideas.
I also stole a single musical phrase from Prokofiev's Violin concerto no.2 in music on part 2. Thanks Spotify for having a version to learn the piece from.
About the Author: Simone Whitlow is an academic, competitive quizzer, songwriter and musician. She has never joined a sex cult.... well, not before this episode was published anyway...
Transgender, she uses she/her pronouns.
Wednesday May 05, 2021
Grace O‘Malley
Wednesday May 05, 2021
Wednesday May 05, 2021
This episode we attend a meeting at Greenwich palace, the date, some time in September 1593. The ‘Fairy Queen’ of England, Elizabeth I, awaits the arrival of one Grace O’Malley – the pirate Queen of Connaught. The two rulers had been at loggerheads for decades and in some ways they seemed wildly different characters – one a genteel Law-lord in charge of a nation.... the other a swashbuckling Warlord from beyond the Pail. Were they all that different? The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us...“Piracy and war gave place to trade, politics and letters; the war-lord to the law-lord; the privilege was kept, whilst the means of obtaining it were changed”
Today, we discuss Grace O’Malley, the Pirate Queen of Connaught.
Read the episode here.
Please leave a like, give us a follow. Share the channel – it will help Tales grow. I post a new episode every fortnight, Wednesday night New Zealand time.
My Patreon, soon to be active can be found here (Launching late May)
Tales of History and Imagination is on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. I also write a weekly Wordpress Blog.
Music, writing, narration, mixing all yours truly. No Foley sounds this week.
I'm planning to share bibliographies far more from now on, why not right? In this case I wrote this episode for the first run at a podcast in 2019 using several news articles (many now paywalled) and Anne Chambers 'Grace O'Malley, the biography of Ireland's Pirate Queen'
About the Author: Simone Whitlow is an academic, competitive quizzer, songwriter, history blogger and musician. Though brought up in New Zealand, Simone has some Irish ancestry on her mother's side.
Transgender, she uses she/her pronouns.