Has it really been more than a year since I published a Teeming Links post? It would seem so. The last one is dated October 2017. Chalk it up to the fact that I’m deep into a Ph.D. and now buried in my dissertation. And also the fact that 2018 was the most insane race-to-the-finish-line experience I’ve had in my non-writing professional career thanks to a year-long project at my college that involved the near-term fate of the institution, and that I was charged with directing. In any case, it’s been too long.
Oh, and I recently reestablished a Twitter presence after abandoning all social media several years ago. Join me there if you’re interested.
On to the links . . .
I read a lot of ebooks these days, but a writer for The Millions is correct: ultimately, when you’re reading a digital book, you’re holding a ghost in your hands.
Speaking of books, John Langan’s new horror fiction collection Sefira and Other Betrayals has some excellent pre-publication buzz, including a glowing review from Publishers Weekly, which says its horrors “all arise from intensely intimate instances of personal betrayal and the emotional unmooring it causes, their vast cosmic scope notwithstanding.” As a confirmed fan of John’s writing, I’m quite looking forward to this one.
Also speaking of books, Erik Davis’s forthcoming High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies promises to be positively delectable. Developed from his doctoral dissertation, which he wrote under the direction of Jeffrey Kripal, it will offer “a study of the spiritual provocations found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson.”
In a recent BBC Radio 4 documentary titled “Losing the Night,” writer and economist Umair Haque, who has to live mostly in the dark, asks if the night itself is being eroded, and what this might mean for all of us.
Isaac Newton’s alchemy was formerly branded an extraneous embarrassment. Now it’s seen as underpinning his whole worldview and standing behind all his endeavors.
According to an insightful writer for The Atlantic, America’s real religion is “workism.” We’ve created “a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs,” and it’s making us miserable. “There is something slyly dystopian about an economic system that has convinced the most indebted generation in American history to put purpose over paycheck. . . . For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity — promising transcendence and community, but failing to deliver.”
Can the United States learn from the fall of Rome? Are we really on a similar path? The idea continues to resonate.
Newsflash: Boredom, as described nicely in this short (one-minute) video featuring the words of psychologist Sandi Mann, is mentally and creatively enriching. These days we short circuit that benefit on a mass scale, primarily through our digital devices. (Um, what was that I said about being on Twitter again? And do things like this very post contribute to the problem?)
In a short, recent, fascinating paper titled “CTHULHU: The Occult Riddle of H. P. Lovecraft,” the author, one Luís Gonçalves, goes all guerilla ontology by employing gematria, the Qur’an, and various mythologies to conduct “a short investigation on the possible roots of the name ‘Cthulhu,’ as the most legendary creation of Lovecraft’s horror fiction.”
Finally, two links related to me. First, my post here on sleep paralysis and discarnate entities, published nine years ago, continues to be a magnet for readers to share their own anomalous sleep experiences. It’s striking to scroll down the list of more than 250 comments, the most recent of which arrived last month, and absorb the fact of just how many people are struck with strange and terrifying sleep-related phenomena.
This past Feb. 13, I experienced not just one but two UFO (or actually UAP) sightings within half an hour of each other. These were unexpected and startling. I submitted a separate report for each to MUFON, which is dispatching investigators. Here’s the first report, and here’s the second. Seriously, these happened. I make no claims about what I “really saw” or what it might mean. I just know I saw it.
Brain photo credit: www.modup.net