Early last month I was the featured guest on an episode of the Lovecraft eZine podcast. Here’s the conversation, in which the free-flowing topics included include Ligotti, Lovecraft, Jon Padgett, weird fiction, religion, Leviathan, Behemoth, sleep paralysis, and belief vs. spiritual awakening. You can also listen to the audio podcast version, where my audio levels…
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.
A haunting choral setting of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
On potentially publishing my private journal
If I published my private journal from the past 30 years, would there be any interest among my readers? I’m asking for a reason and seeking honest feedback. I journaled obsessively from age 18 to around 33, with an especially prolific period occurring in the first decade after I graduated from college, and currently I…
We’re all deep fakes now
Nicholas Carr at his (consistently essential) blog, Rough Type: It’s revealing that, before the arrival of the net, people didn’t talk about “authenticity” as we do today. They didn’t have to. They understood, implicitly, that there was something solid behind whatever show they might put on for public consumption. The show was not everything. The…
The Ghostly Art: All Writing Is Haunted
Powerful insights from Ed Simon, Editor-at-Large for LARB’s Marginalia, in an essay for The Millions in which he not only traces a history of hauntedness in various key works of literature (by the likes of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, Morrison, Chambers, Lovecraft, and King) but relates a couple of his own genuinely weird personal encounters with…
Horror Fiction and the Awakening and Evolution of Consciousness
In the introduction to The Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult — an anthology of classic horror stories that deal in one way or another with the named subjects — Lon Milo DuQuette, who also edited the book, relates his boyhood experience of awakening for the first time to both a love of richly…
Dreams, Waking Reality, and the Purpose of Your Life
In A Course in Demonic Creativity, I recommend reading your life like a dream or a creative narrative (a novel, a movie) to discern symbols and themes that can serve as clues to your overall life pattern, your purpose, your creative calling, your destiny and life mission as embodied in the concept of the daemon…
“It’s an Alien Life Form”: David Bowie on the Internet’s Exhilarating and Terrifying Potential
There’s been a lot of ink spilled in the last thirty years, both physical and digital, explaining and exploring the phenomenon that is the Internet. From the enthusiastic optimism of such influential figures as Clay Shirky and Seth Godin, to the heavily cautious middle ground of such figures as Douglas Rushkoff, to the all-out pessimism…
A Psychic Invasion from Above and Below: Our Present Cultural Apocalypse
As someone who rode the apocalyptic wave of the aughts and 2010s very hard, I find it striking to note the uncanny, almost clinical precision with which mythologist and author Michael Meade, writing back in 2012 about trends that were then becoming visible, forecast and diagnosed the deep mythic-psychological apocalyptic eruptions of 2020-2021: Often apocalyptic…
How to Handle the Cult of Optimism: Thoughts from Novelist/Screenwriter Matthew Specktor
Here are some sage and sobering reflections from Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine and Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, in response to an interview question about how to maintain realistic expectations amid the contemporary cult of optimism and positive thinking: INTERVIEWER: Today the cult of…