8/30: coming upon

...a paragraph in R. F. Kuang's Katabasis that made me smile:

Now, magick had progressed a lot since, say, the primitive rituals suggested by the Uffington chalk inscriptions, and there had since been a proliferation of flashy subfields that in fact had nothing to do with chalk, but rather all sorts of arcane objects, enchanted music, and visual illusions.  One could now study the archaeology of magick, the history of magick, the music of magick, and on and on.  Over in America, visual illusions and flashy showmanship were all the rage.  In Europe they were going on about things called postmodernist and postructuralist magick, which seemed to involve lots of spells doing the opposite of what their inventors wanted, and spells that did nothing at all, which everyone claimed was very profound.