Fascinating stuff from the always excellent online magazine Psyche, with insights of value for both fiction writers (who often find their characters “coming to life” in strange ways) and psychonauts both natural and psychedelic (who often encounter autonomous-seeming intelligences and entities in inner space): My fascination with dream characters began while I was in college….
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 Blessed Silence: On Solving Writer’s Block by Accepting It
Victoria Nelson’s On Writer’s Block: A New Approach to Creativity has long been one of the core entries in my library of books on writing and the creative process. Now I’m fascinated to see Brandon Taylor, author of the widely acclaimed novel Real Life and the just-released fiction collection Filthy Animals, talking about his own…
The Best Thomas Ligotti Story You’ve (Probably) Never Read
Thomas Ligotti’s “Ghost Stories for the Dead” first appeared in 1982 in the second issue of the small press horror magazine Grimoire. It opened with an epigraph drawn from E. M. Cioran: “That faint light in each of us which dates back before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if…
Above the Fray: Is There an Unconditioned Truth beyond Time and Culture?
This week a colleague, having read some of my essays involving esoteric and weird religious and philosophical matters — which will appear in my forthcoming essay collection (title reveal: What the Daemon Said) — remarked that he wondered why those who vaunt Eastern or other perspectives don’t realize that these may be just as time-…
On limiting your speech to protect your art
From a 1956 profile of Edward Hopper in Time magazine, here’s an arresting illustration of single-minded dedication to one’s art by deliberately embracing silence and limiting one’s self-expression in other forms to avoid careless leaks of creative vision and energy: Offered a gold medal by the National Institute of Arts and Letters last year, Hopper…
Horror Movies, Transcendence, and a Symbiosis between the Demonic and the Divine
Here’s Will H. Rockett, in his book Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty, saying things that affected and influenced me deeply in the 1990s when I was first divining the nexus of responsiveness that I had recognized within myself to intimations of religious transcendence both divine and demonic, beatific and horrifying,…
When Artificial Intelligence Hacks the Muse
Stephen Marche in The New Yorker: Sudowrite uses, as its base, GPT-3, the latest version of a deep-learning neural network that can auto-generate text. The organization that created GPT-3, OpenAI, was founded as a nonprofit with a mission “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,…
A World Edged with a Baseless Terror: The Lessons of School Educational Videos
Joel Golby on the surreal horror of the educational films and videos that many of us grew up with: [A] calm voice tells you of the mysteries of the ocean; a man with an ungroomed beard stands emotionlessly in front of some cream-colored industrial machinery; an incredibly lo-fi, three-cel animation tells you how frogs are…
For Writers: Make a Place in Your Plan for the Irrational and Mysterious
Novelist Maria Mutch, writing for Literary Hub: Efficiency, rationalism, progress, all perfectly decent ideas that also call to mind the American highway-building madness of the 1950s, for instance, or the current financial paradigm of ceaseless and predictable growth, and which, left to overtake the novel-writing process, can obscure or squeeze out altogether what is mysterious…
Everything Is More Beautiful Because We’re Doomed
The Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi has become something of a fashionable rage in America during the past few years, partly as an attitudinal accompaniment to the cultural influx of Kondo-style decluttering (Marie Kondo has said she’s partly inspired by wabi-sabi) and its interaction with the trendy rise of a minimalist aesthetic. Wabi-sabi refers to…