In a word: wow. This new short film, released on July 30 and currently receiving enthusiastic praise all over the place, is a beautifully realized piece of short-form dystopian science fiction. It tells the story of a near future in which, to quote the official press release, “a neurologist and two homicide detectives use experimental…
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.
Teeming Links – July 9, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net The presiding reflection for today’s offering of recommended and necessary reading and viewing comes from British novelist and essayist Tim Parks, who elicits an important truth about the silence that so many of us seek, or say we think we seek, amid a culture of clamor: Arguably, when…
C. S. Lewis, Narnia, and mythic truth: “Stories are mirrors that show us our soul”
From a splendid essay by young adult novelist Zu Vincent and creative writing teacher Kiara Koenig, published in Through the Wardrobe: Your Favorite Authors on C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (2010), about the exquisite philosophical-spiritual value of finding solace, solitude, and authentic meaning in fictional stories amid our contemporary culture of scientistic disenchantment and…
Teeming Links – August 6, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net James Howard Kunstler was in rare form in a recent salvo against the pervasive and putatively hopeful (but actually despairingly awful) wish, especially here in America, that techno-industrial society might continue to survive indefinitely instead of doing what it’s actually in the very earliest stages of beginning to…
How reading and literature effectively reincarnate us into a higher form of consciousness
From Mark Edmundson, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, a passionate paean to the college English major as a field of study that is ultimately devoted to “pursuing the most important subject of all — being a human being”: Soon college students all over America will be trundling to their advisers’ offices to choose…
Validating Ray Bradbury: Climate change and high temps linked to violent behavior
Remember Ray Bradbury’s famous fascination with the idea that hot weather spurs an increase in assaults and other violent behavior? This was the basic premise behind his widely reprinted 1954 short story “Touched with Fire,” in which two retired insurance salesmen try to prevent a murder. In a key passage, one of them shares his…
Teeming Links – August 2, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net I invite you to peruse today’s offering of necessary and recommended reading under the overarching emotional/conceptual rubric of this recent rumination about the extreme value of ambivalence and undecidedness amid our present sociocultural circumstance of frenetic and manipulative opinion-peddling and belief-mongering: We live in a society in which…
Shirley Jackson: Witchcraft, madness, and the uncanny dangers of writing
From a long and uncommonly engrossing essay by Victoria Best at Open Letters Monthly about the relationship between life, art, madness, and the occult in the work and person of Shirley Jackson: She believed [writing] had a protective function, too, a kind of mental hygiene that allowed her to be herself: âThe very nicest thing…
Teeming Links – July 30, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net To preface today’s offering of recommended and required reading, here’s a not-so-idle speculation from Damien Walter about the momentous fact of our collective cultural obsession with losing ourselves in the ever more immersive fantasy worlds that digital technology has enabled for us: I am a writer and critic…
Short film ‘The Flying Man’: A dark and faintly Fortean take on superheroes
Over at The Daily Grail, Greg describes this fascinating and very slick short film as a “fun little superhero story with a Fortean feel to it.” io9’s Observation Deck calls the title character “the creepiest superhero” and concurs about the film’s quasi-Fortean dimension. Both point out that it recalls Mexico’s rash of flying humanoid sightings…