Last month Morris Berman delivered a speech titled “In Praise of Shadows” as he accepted this year’s Neil Postman Award for Public Intellectual Activity.
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.
“Lovecraftian horror at its best”: Don Webb reviews Richard Gavin’s ‘At Fear’s Altar’
What tangled web of eldritch synchronicities is this!? In 2006 I reviewed Richard Gavin’s strong first collection of supernatural/numinous horror fiction, Omens, for the journal Dead Reckonings. In the years after that, Richard and I forged a good online friendship. In 2011 he and I, and also our fellow horror scribe Simon Strantzas, roomed together…
Americans: Wild about apocalypse
This fine little BBC video presents an able summary of the central role that the idea of the apocalypse has played in American history right from its earliest beginnings. It effectively serves as a summary of and introduction to the 2012 book The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us about America…
Meditation, the daimon muse, and the I Ching
Several thousand people have now downloaded my free e-book A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius (formerly available at Demon Muse, which I have now shut down because of repeated hacks and security breaches). There’s obviously a widespread interest in the idea, experience, and practice of what feels like inner…
Doris Lessing on storytellers as myth-makers: “Our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world”
From Doris Lessing’s lecture in acceptance of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature: We are a jaded lot, we in our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost…
Teeming Links – July 12, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net This week, a change in format: The Teeming Brain’s long-running “Recommended Reading” series will henceforth be titled “Teeming Links.” It will also shift to a streamlined format that does away with the former practice of including extensive excerpts and publication information from the linked items. I want to…
Jack Parsons: Occultist, sci-fi muse, US space program pioneer
My documentary “essay” on legendary/notorious space program pioneer and Crowleyan occultist Jack Parsons, composed of carefully chosen quotes and extracts from other writings, is now the featured piece at The Daily Grail: “The Tragic Tale of the Rocket Maker“ Many thanks go out to The Daily Grail’s mastermind, Greg Taylor, for expressing an interest in this…
Arthur Machen in the underworld
Fans and admirers of Arthur Machen and his literary universe of mystical terror take note: one week ago BBC Radio 4 broadcast a delicious half-hour exploration of Machen’s life, work, and literary legacy, presented in the form of a tour of various sites in Wales that are relevant to his biography and major themes. It’s…
Bloated banks are “an existential threat” bigger than terrorism
John Lanchester, writing for London Review of Books, offers a dire warning about the status of Britain’s big banks that likewise speaks loudly to all of us living over here across the pond, since we’re in a similar situation: As the new governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, takes up his job, it’s…
Lovecraft, Tolkien, and the nightmare as “a necessary drug for the mass consciousness”
Here’s a description of the book Nightmare: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project (Brill, 2013) by Russian-born literary and cultural scholar Dina Khapaeva, who is currently serving as chair of the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech: What is a nightmare as a psychological experience, a literary experiment and a cultural project? Why has…