Welcome to the new Teeming Brain

The beast has slouched and the stars are right. Elder gods shudder in their ancient sleep. Ripples spread across the interwebs. The brain has landed.

In short, welcome to the new Teeming Brain, also known as The Teeming Brain 2.0.

As you’re already noticing from this page’s appearance if you’ve been a visitor at any previous point during The Teeming Brain’s history, things have now, to put it mildly, changed. Effective today, this is no longer my personal blog but a communally written blog of ideas in an age of apocalypse. This relaunch involves a comprehensive remaking and re-visioning of the whole enterprise from the ground up.

As I said last month in “The future of The Teeming Brain,” anybody who’s hung out here any length of time will be well aware that I make frequent use of this space to track doomer trends, dystopian developments, and collapse-oriented news in economics, education, ecology, energy use, technological transformation, and more, right alongside and intertwined with the ongoing focus on fascinating books and films, psychology, spirituality, creativity, horror, the paranormal, and a host of other subjects, topics, and trends. In recent months I came to recognize that this combined focus on ideas and apocalypse lies at the heart of what the blog is all about, for the simple reason that it lies at the heart of what I myself am all about: seeing deeply into things, sensing the ideas and principles that underlie conventional surface understandings, and observing how this overturns and transforms both reality at large and personal life up close, often in the most intimate and unnerving of ways.

Some years ago the reviewer of my Divinations of the Deep for Cemetery Dance magazine wrote that “In each of these stories, the author personalizes the apocalyptic question of ultimate power and order.” Around the beginning of this year, I began to realize that he was hitting upon something truly foundational. We’re now beginning to see things come apart at the seams here on planet earth — ecologically, psychologically, spiritually, politically, economically, socially, culturally — and this raises the question of ultimate power and order: of how things really work on a planetary and cosmic scale, and of whether we have erected upon this foundation a creaking false facade that is destined to collapse, with results that will both flow from and lead to epic transformations in consciousness and culture. This is all staring us right in the face, and is all demanding a personal response to apocalyptic issues. And this, obviously, amounts to a far larger issue than just me and my desire to have a venue for venting my teeming thoughts.

And so, after a month of intensive work and collaboration with fellow writers and thinkers, the results are in. The Teeming Brain has metamorphosed into something different, something richer.

Here’s a brief guide to the new order of things.

NEW ADDRESS AND SITE STRUCTURE

OUR ADDRESS is now www.teemingbrain.com. Yes, we have our own domain! Please update any links, and know that if you try to visit the old WordPress.com site, you’ll be redirected here anyway.

Also be sure to UPDATE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS, whether you subscribe by email or RSS feed. The old blog will go dormant. All activity is now here. Look to the top of the right-hand column for sign-up instructions.

We have a completely redesigned PAGE STRUCTURE, as you can see from the menu above. I suggest you start by browsing through the pages to get a full rundown of what the new Teeming Brain is all About, as well as bios of the Teem (the contributors) and a collective listing of the popular Teeming Brain Interviews. There’s also an online Bookshelf (which is also an Amazon bookstore) presenting titles by our contributors and interviewees, along with an extensive and constantly evolving list of recommended reading (and viewing) in areas germane to the Teeming Brain’s focus. You’ll also find a page to Contact us and a page where you can offer financial to Support this project.

We also have a completely redesigned structure of  CATEGORIES/TOPICS. You’ll find it in the navigation column at the right, and also at the bottom of every page. Everything we publish will fall under one or more of these topics, including Arts & Entertainment, Economy, Education, Government & Politics, Paranormal, Philosophy & Religion, Psychology & Consciousness, Science & Technology, and more. If The Teeming Brain were a book, these would be your chapter titles.

Our TAGS have also been cleaned up, revised, purged, and improved. See the tag cloud at right and use it to your heart’s content for help in navigating our profusion of essays, articles, and posts, and finding the ones that speak to your particular needs and interests. If this were a book, the tags would be your index.

There’s also an extensive and ever-growing list of LINKS to highly recommended sources of insight, erudition, and intellectual entertainment in the right-hand column, divided into “Idea Factories” and “Teeming Brains,” the former being online journals and magazines and such, and the latter blogs and sites that are written by or focusing on just one or two individuals.

CONTRIBUTORS AND COLUMNS

Most significantly, and as mentioned above, The Teeming Brain is now a communally written enterprise. I spent several weeks contacting some of the best and sharpest writers and thinkers I know, and they’ve now come aboard to help make the site a richer resource than you’ve yet seen. (The roster of contributors is still growing, by the way. Look for announcements about newly acquired teem members in the near future.)

Here’s the current lineup:

• T.E. GRAU is an essayist and author extraordinaire of Weird, Lovecraftian, and Dark Fiction. He’s also the fiction editor of Strange Aeons magazine. Here at The Teeming Brain, he will contribute a monthly column titled The Extinction Papers. It launches with “If Science Kills God, What Fate the Devil?“
• DAVID METCALFE is the Books Editor for The Revealer (the online journal for NYU’s Center for Religion and Media), and is an independent researcher, cultural historian, and artist focusing on anomalous and transpersonal experiences. He will contribute a weekly column titled De Umbris Idearum. It launches with “Phantom Histories: Thoughts on the Work of Medievalist Claude Lecouteux.”
• STUART YOUNG is the British Fantasy Award-winning author of The Mask Behind the Face, Spare Parts, and Shards of Dreams. He’s also a walking encyclopedia of information and insights on fantasy, science fiction, and horror in all of their genre forms and combinations. He will contribute a monthly column titled Sparking Neurones. It launches with “Everything Old Is New Again (If You Don’t Look Too Hard).” Be advised that British spellings abound!
• Matt Cardin — who, as you may be aware, is me — will serve as editor of all these goings-on. I’ll also continue to publish my own articles and essays, and will keep scanning the vastness of the media webs and curating compelling content for our mutual fascination and edification. In a more formally scheduled vein, I’ll write a weekly column titled Liminalities, launching a week from today.

You can read full bios for all of us on the contributors page.

DONATIONS

On our Support page, and also in the right-hand navigation, you’ll find options for supporting us with donations. The Teeming Brain has been a labor of love for six years, and has always been — and will always be — ad-free. There’s now a financial expense involved in publishing it, what with the move to its own teemingbrain.com domain. There’s also a much-expanded, and in fact massive, investment of time, energy, and attention involved in scanning the media, writing and editing the content, maintaining the site, and keeping everything humming and harmonious. If you enjoy The Teeming Brain and find it worthwhile and valuable, please consider making a modest donation, whether as a single amount or a voluntary monthly “subscription,” to help defray the costs associated with the project.

OUR TEEMING AGE OF APOCALYPSE

And now I’ll leave you to browse around and get oriented, and to read the opening columns from our three new contributors. We’re all quite pleased to have you here, and we invite you to comment on our posts, send suggestions through our Contact page, and get as involved as you want to be. Here’s to at least six more years of broad-spectrum engagement with everything fascinating, exhilarating, profound, disturbing, amusing, beautiful, and terrifying in our teeming age of apocalypse.

Welcome to the new Teeming Brain.