Fascinating: last week, right on the heels of Harold Ramis’s death, Esquire published “An Oral History of Ghostbusters” (originally published in Premiere Magazine), in which various cast and crew members recount the making, reception, and enduring cultural impact of everybody’s favorite ghost-chasing movie. And it leads with a statement from Dan Aykroyd about the way the…
Author: Matt Cardin
Teeming Brain founder and editor Matt Cardin is the author of DARK AWAKENINGS, DIVINATIONS OF THE DEEP, A COURSE IN DEMONIC CREATIVITY: A WRITER'S GUIDE TO THE INNER GENIUS, and TO ROUSE LEVIATHAN. He is also the editor of BORN TO FEAR: INTERVIEWS WITH THOMAS LIGOTTI and the academic encyclopedias MUMMIES AROUND THE WORLD; GHOSTS, SPIRITS, AND PSYCHICS: THE PARANORMAL FROM ALCHEMY TO ZOMBIES; and HORROR LITERATURE THROUGH HISTORY.
Apocalyptic America: Our psychic lens of doom and gloom
Stefany Anna Goldberg recently offered some interesting reflections on the reality and nature of America’s enduring obsession with the idea and sense of an impending apocalypse. She rightly points out that, culturally speaking, the roots of this tendency extend all the way down to a positively genetic level: America is a nation rooted in Apocalypse….
How “the news” creates a fake hyperworld in our heads
This absorbing video condenses the message presented by philosopher Alain de Botton in his new book The News: A User’s Manual, whose basic thesis and purpose is described by the publisher as follows: We are never really taught how to make sense of the torrent of news we face every day . . . but…
Lost in translation: Disastrous foreign renderings of American brand names and ad slogans
During my undergraduate days, I learned from one of my communication professors that the Coca-Cola company ran into an unexpected complication during their initial incursions into Chinese markets when the very name of the product caused mass confusion. Apparently, the syllables “ko-ka-ko-la” are nonsensical in Mandarin, where they can be taken to mean, roughly, “bite…
The paranormal: America’s new religion?
I would be interested to hear how many Teeming Brain readers find aspects of their own beliefs and experiences described by this extremely interesting article at Pacific Standard, and/or how many of you have observed the trend it identifies playing out in the lives of people you know. That trend, by the way, is “a…
Entering the fictive dream: The shamanistic, alchemical approach to writing
Andre Dubus III In On Becoming a Novelist — one of my favorite books about writing — John Gardner emphasizes the centrality of the “fictive dream,” the mental-imaginal movie that novelists are tasked with entering as deeply as possible so that they can channel it onto the page and thus recreate it in the imagination of the…
The Return of The Teeming Brain
Greetings, Teeming friends. After a break of — what has it been now? four months? — I’ve recently been tracking certain subtle indicators, auguries, and ripplings in the cosmic aether that indicate it’s time to rouse The Teeming Brain from its long winter’s nap. While I’m at it, I would like to broadcast a special…
The Teeming Brain: A Hiatus
If you’re a regular reader, then you will have noticed that it has been over two weeks since the last post was published here. This is due to the fact that, as I have explained to several friends and colleagues recently, I’m presently in the midst of what amounts to a veritable apocalypse of busyness….
Teeming Links – October 4, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net To preface today’s (short but dense) collection of recommended and necessary reading, here’s a lengthy opening word about the ultimate closing word — which is to say, several excerpts from a recent article about the upsurge of apocalyptic themes in American entertainment. As we all know, there’s been…
Ray Bradbury: A life of mythic numinosity
Long-time Teeming Brain readers are well aware that Ray Bradbury frequently comes up in conversation here. Like so many other people, and as I detailed three years ago in “The October Mystique: 7 Authors on the Visionary Magic of Ray Bradbury,” I tend to think of him especially when October and the autumn season roll…