Apologies to all Teeming Brain readers for the lack of a new Recommended Reading post today. All of my spare time this week has been taken up by various other commitments, including writing and turning in the first installment of “Numinosities,” my new column about horror, religion, and philosophy for [Nameless] Magazine. Then there’s 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.
Alan Watts on choosing your life’s work: Forget the money, follow your deep desire
What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like? … [When counseling graduating students who ask for career advice,] I always ask the question, “What would you do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?” … If you say that getting the…
Awake inside the American Nightmare
The responsibility for being a real person instead of an economic zombie-drone whose raison d’être is employment by and for the system and its goal of indefinite self-perpetuation lies entirely on you. Only you can wake up. The organs of the American Nightmare can’t and won’t do it for you, and this includes the colleges, including, increasingly, the liberal arts ones.
“Parapsychology Today” – David Metcalfe interviewed
Our own David Metcalfe recently appeared as the featured guest on the Expanding Mind radio show. The episode, which is fully streamable and downloadable, is titled “Parapsychology Today” and described like this: “Parapsychology, esotericism, and the changing information landscape: a talk with writer and blogger David Metcalfe.” Click the player to listen, or visit the…
H.P. Lovecraft, Literary Hackwork, and the Horror of a Malevolently Indifferent Universe
Yesterday Geoffrey Pullum, Gerard visiting professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University and professor of general linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, penned a blog post for the Lingua Franca blog at The Chronicle of Higher Education about his recent visit to a couple of Lovecraftian sites in Providence. I was pleased…
The daemonic discipline of Vincent van Gogh
The mythic potency of a life that is veritably (or literally) possessed by a daemonic creative force is beautifully and terrifyingly illustrated by the life, work, death, and legacy of Vincent van Gogh. So is the fact that a deliberate dedication to channeling this force through a discipline of strict technical training can result in…
Christianity, Islam, and a call for evangelicals to practice what they preach
The attitude and ideas expressed in this excellent op-ed, aimed specifically at evangelical Christians and co-written by Teeming Brain friend John W. Morehead (proprietor of the always-fantastic Theofantastique), are so very necessary amid the current international conflagration over that hit-job of a negative propaganda film about Islam. Much of the conservative commentary on this event,…
Resist Dystopia: Learn to Enjoy Reading Shakespeare
At the conclusion of Technopoly, Neil Postman lays out his concept of the “loving resistance fighter,” someone who keeps an open heart and a strong hold on the symbols and narratives of liberty, honor, intelligence, etc., that made America (and, by extension, other modern democracies) great, while deliberately resisting the coarsening, dumbing, soul-killing influence of…
Ancient pharaohs, temporal lobe epilepsy, and the birth of monotheism
Did the religious visions and experiences associated with temporal lobe epilepsy, suffered across generations by a pivotally important royal family in ancient Egypt, give birth to monotheism? This newly advanced theory, which adds a possible new dimension to the longstanding and widely accepted belief that monotheism was founded by the pharaoh Akhenaten, a.k.a. Amenhotep IV…
John Dee’s Enochian Apocalypse
Doctor John Dee (1527-1609) remains one of London’s most intriguing historical figures. He was a confidant of Queen Elizabeth I, who guided the nation through one of its most challenging eras, partly based upon Dee’s unique blend of alchemy, divination and Hermetic philosophy. In fact, the Queen had so much faith in Dee’s calculations she…