# the professor's lighthouse standing alone on a grassy headland on a forgotten coast involves a theatre made from a whale's ribcage senses of sweeping historical epics having passed through the location a passion and poise for amateur dramatics in all ir old timey jazz age glory a devotion to flamenco with references to arthurian legend and french literary theory smart looking custom suits as though hand made in / from near retro future vienna becoming someone's ever maddeningly predictable informal life coach cocktails cocktails cocktails at breakfast and costumes at teatime louche bohemian artistry / complex romantic literary community comforting necessary illusions all round general sense of the entire fresh new world as a ripe peach for plucking fellow researcher henry swanson: alas - in which 'tpl' is only ever researcher swain's private delusional ideological wish to be fabulously old worldly rich and (/seen as) cultured(tm) - whatever that means - 'well trained' perhaps some supremely privileged yet oh-so humble gentlemen o' leisure idly watching ir jewelled tortoise slowly crawling across a magic persian carpet in some suitably grand private study filled to its tall ceiling with credible books full of hopelessly interesting knowledge and otherworldly treasure maps decidedly average 'dark academia' tinged euro-parisian art sensibility; a pair of unused neo-victorian steampunk retro tech eyewear in a long forgotten drawer yet how much absurd vague historical fantasy directly depends on historically exclusionary colonial eurocentric myths - the silent privilege of whiteness and perfectly naturalised inequality (systemic racism and anti-blackness) an apartheid of knowledge - a cultural dictatorship disguised and dressed in smart mahogany book shelves and a nice writing desk upon which sit ancient tomes full of arcane knowledge horded by inherently internally crumbling empires of massively elf-circumscribed imagination - the sheer decaying mouldy weight of western intellectual hegemony pressing down on the minds of the present the professor's lilghthouse while serving (some) well as a wondrous fantastical escapist retreat and place of refined refuge too often it seems entirely to fail in the critical self-reflectivity needed to acknowledge it's symbolic role as a means of systematic erasure of colonised voices which continue to uphold the engines of oppression one wouldn't be at-all surprised to see the odd pith helmet hanging around along with a horrible elephant's-foot stand for gentlemen's walking sticks that is white phantasy enshrined as a virtual literary monument - a canon of imaginary architecture as little more than another mausoleum of imperial legacy - aestheticised (read whitewashed) and repackaged into another all-too romantic vision of 'refined' intellectual and cultural pursuit // republic of bob