I have to start this edition of Teeming Links with a very special message:
Vale and R.I.P., Wilum H. Pugmire, 1951-2019
Wilum died this week after several years of troubled health, and the news hit me hard even though it has been quite some time since I spoke with him. If you’re not familiar with him and his work (which he published as W. H. Pugmire), here’s his Wikipedia entry, plus an interview and another interview (by Nicole Cushing), to fill you in.
I first met Wilum in Seattle at the 2001 World Horror Convention, where he constituted a very colorful presence. Then when my first print publication occurred in the 2002 anthology The Children of Cthulhu, Wilum was in there, too. So he has been part of my mental and personal world as a reader and writer of Lovecraftian fiction for quite some time.
A few years ago, his place in my life became much more specific. It was through his unsolicited and generous actions that I was put together with Hippocampus Press for the purpose of producing a new collection of my fiction. When that collection, To Rouse Leviathan, is published just a few months from now, it will owe its existence largely to Wilum’s unpaid facilitation, which he offered spontaneously, out of the blue, just because he was that kind of person. On the book’s acknowledgments page, he’s the first person I name.
Others in the horror community have their own, similar stories about what a lovely human being Wilum was. And that’s not even to say anything his own contributions as an author, which are substantial.
Goodbye, Wilum. You will definitely be missed.
Have you heard of Dr. D. W. Pasulka and her book American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology? You can gain a solid understanding and appreciation of its contents from the article “Belief in Aliens Could Be America’s Next Religion” at The Outline, which tells of Dr. Pasulka’s explorations into “how the once-fringe phenomenon has taken root among the powerful,” with tech billionaires devoting themselves seriously to UFOlogy, recovered alien tech, and the like. Dr. Pasulka is Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. This makes her work all the more significant.
From The Orlando Sentinel, here’s an interesting gauge of the current status of UFOlogical beliefs: “‘Alien in my Backyard:’ The UFO Community Still Believes — and Science Is Starting to Listen.”
Speaking of which: “What happens to religion when we find aliens?” In the linked piece, a Rabbi, an Imam, and a Christian theologian discuss what life in space could mean for the spiritual.
Issue 37 of EdgeScience is now out. Looks fascinating. It’s free. And it includes the following tantalizingly titled piece by none other than the above-mentioned Dr. Pasulka: “The Reception of Scientific Ideas from Alleged Supernatural Beings and Extraterrestrials: A Chapter in the History of Unorthodox Science.”
There are just too many good books to get to lately. However, one that sounds like we all need to wrap our heads around it is Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, which is all the rage right now (along with the above-described American Cosmic, making for a rather revealing literary syzygy). The idea of “surveillance capitalism,” which is Zuboff’s own original coinage (she’s a scholar of sociology and business at Harvard and the author of 1988’s In the Age of the Smart Machine), holds that the new world of digital tech has overwhelmed our cultural safeguards, which were utterly unprepared even to comprehend this new threat. The result is that now, to quote the official publisher’s description, “vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new ‘behavioral futures markets,’ where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new ‘means of behavioral modification.'” As Zuboff sees it, this is not just a technological revolution but a completely new and intrinsically dystopian form of capitalism. Read “Capitalism’s New Clothes” at The Baffler and “‘The Goal is to Automate Us’: Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism” at The Guardian for good primers. Also see this astute critique at Inside Higher Ed, which argues that the problem isn’t so much a totalitarian Big Data coup from above as an uncontrollable Frankenstein that Big Tech has unleashed and that is now beyond even their control, as seen most recently and sickeningly in the unstoppable proliferation of the New Zealand shooter video.
Meanwhile, according to the 2019 World Happiness Report, the U.S. is the unhappiest it’s ever been because of our business-driven culture of addiction. Knock me over with a feather.
If all of the above strikes you as a downer, this bracing shot of wisdom from Morris Berman for our present troubled moment might help: “Speaking of Liberation.” TLDR: There’s probably no hope for humanity at large, so it’s better to focus on your own personal awakening from history’s nightmare.
From The Daily Grail, here’s a great article for starting your day with your head blown off: Remember The Young Ones? Yeah, me too. I fell in love with it during my undergraduate days. But do you remember the fifth young one who lived in the flat with Vyvyan, Rick, Neil, and Mike? The young girl who mysteriously appeared in various scenes? Yeah, me neither. But apparently she was there.
It was also in college that I first became acquainted with the Church of the SubGenius. For a while I took to posting images of “Bob” Dobbs around Columbia, Missouri. Now comes this:
For all you Death Metal fans out there, be advised that I suspected as much: “Death Metal Inspires Joy, Not Violence.”
However, things aren’t so good for horror fans, at least according to Instagram: “‘Can We Help?’ Instagram Suggests ‘#Horror’ Fans Are in Danger of ‘Harm’ & ‘Death.’“
Speaking of horror, Cody Goodfellow’s take on the Lovecraft Problem in this essay — which appears in Forbidden Futures 3 — may be the most lucid, insightful, and helpful that I’ve read: “Lovecraft Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.”
In the video below, Dr. Andreas Sommer, who really knows his stuff, explains 1) why your knowledge of science and magic is almost certainly based on demonstrable falsehoods, and 2) why the intertwined history of these subjects is far more significant than you may think.
A recent interview with Christian Wiman for The New Criterion shows the poet emitting a profusion of lucid, insightful, and beautiful thoughts the way a bonfire sends up sparks “I don’t think that art is something that’s going to save you or that it’s the single most important thing in life,” he says. “I find the writing of poetry a kind of torment ultimately, though it’s also a great elation. I just don’t think it’s going to save me. . . . [A]rt can’t save you. It can give you glimpses of something beautiful, maybe even something redemptive, but there’s nothing there to hold onto. Art is a means, not an end. “
Finally, Vastarien volume 2, issue 1 is now available. The TOC is wonderful, with fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork from the likes of Gemma Files, Forrest Aguirre, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Rhys Hughes, and Matthew M. Bartlett. I’m proud to have been centrally involved in the journal’s inception and the development of the first two issues. Now Jon Padgett continues to take it from strength to strength. (And if all goes well, I may return for an editorial stint in the foreseeable future.)
