A few days ago SF Signal invited me to participate in one of their Mind Melds, with the topic announced in the form of a question: “What book(s) in your ‘to read’ pile are you most interested in reading? Why?” So I whipped up something and sent it to them, and it was published just…
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.
Writers: Inhabit your delusions, embrace your freakishness
Longreads — my favorite online portal to high-quality longform writing — invited me to be their “featured Longreader” for the June 8 edition of their weekly newsletter. Here’s what I sent them: My favorite longread of the week is A Psychotronic Childhood, by Colson Whitehead, in The New Yorker. Whitehead and I grew up right…
Twitter vs. blogs in an age of cheap language
Here’s a nicely nuanced and truly elegant little meditation on the meanings (note the plural) of Twitter in an age of universally blogified (in the bad sense) writing — with equal attention given to the latter phenomenon. Few things could appear much worse, to the lurker, glimpser, or guesser, than this scrolling suicide note of…
Waking up from the nightmare of economics
If you, like me, are consistently struck these days by a kind of unpleasant, inverted sense of numinous awe at the spectacle of economists still occupying major positions of mainstream power and respect in our culture instead of walking around in hairshirts and beating their breasts with heads bowed in unbearable shame, then Columbia University…
Recommended Reading 12
This week’s links and readings add up to an exceptionally rich and varied smorgasbord. Topics include: planetary environmental Armageddon plus other modes of doom, along with the American psychology of denial regarding the true direness of our present situation; the authentic rise of an American totalitarian state along the lines of Nuremberg; the egregiously overlooked…
Is the spiritual counterculture doomed?
I would love to gainsay the point made by Nicholas Fuller in a recent essay at Evolutionary Landscapes. Sites like Reality Sandwich, and movements like Evolver, and the entire subcultural milieu that they represent, not to mention the general worldview they inhabit and promulgate, are near and dear to me. But damn it, Fuller is…
Google: Not making us stupid, not making us smart
A recently published essay by University of Virginia professor Chad Wellmon in The Hedgehog Review stands as one of the most elegant, incisive, and persuasive entries I’ve yet read in the great debate over the effects of the Internet/digital media revolution on human consciousness and culture. And I’ve read a fair amount of them. Wellmon…
The future of The Teeming Brain
If you can believe it, I have now been writing this blog for six years. Today is The Teeming Brain’s birthday. I launched it on June 13, 2006, and was surprised and gratified to see a sizable audience come together rather rapidly. In the launch post I said, among other things: The expression “teeming brain”…
Recommended Reading 11
This week’s reading covers: social, political, economic, and cultural craziness and breakdown in America and Europe; a dystopian view of smartphones; an official CDC denial of a zombie holocaust in the wake of horrific incidents flooding the American media; the possible action of quantum effects in the macro-world; a cogent criticism of scientistic materialism in…
“Reincarnation”: An entrancing experimental video
Find a quiet, solitary environment free of distractions, turn up your speakers or put in your earbuds, and let this thing unfold in full-screen mode. I was mesmerized myself. The music, not incidentally, is Black Sabbath’s psychedelic and hypnotic “Planet Caravan,” representing a style that is pointedly not what the band is most widely remembered…