Ray Douglas Bradbury, photo by NASA (http://history.nasa.gov/EP-125/part6.htm) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons I was stunned when the news of Ray Bradbury’s death broke today. Yes, he was a very old man who suffered from declining health, a man who obviously stood near the end of his life. But that’s immaterial to my emotional reaction. When…
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.
Recommended Reading 10
This week’s links and reading cover apocalyptic trends and their cultural, psychological, and artistic/literary aspects; economic collapse in America and Europe, with attendant venality on the part of politicians and the wealthy elite; the rise of an ĂŒber-surveillance state in America; epic protests in Canada; the decline and fall (and continued decline after falling) of…
Decline, collapse, and doom: Snapshots from Europe, America, and planet earth
This morning when I went to scan the day’s delivery of essays, news, and information, one of the first things that came to my attention was this: Nothing Iâve heard from politicians or economists on the world crisis has shivered my spine like an hour spent with the gentleâmannered historian Antony Beevor, whose mighty new…
Recommended Reading 9
This week’s recommended articles, essays, and blog posts cover: various possible modes of doom that await us (or that are facing us right now), including climate change, economic collapse, and some other usual suspects; the hijacking of global culture by money and its possibly psychopathic servants; the historical role of alchemy in giving birth to…
Psychiatry’s internal war over “mental illness” unhinges everything
Have you or anybody you care about ever suffered from depression? How about bipolar disorder? Autism? Schizophrenia? Attention-deficit disorder? Obviously, given the prevalence of these mental and neurological illnesses, the answer is almost certainly affirmative. Or then again, maybe not. Here’s the dirty little trick that’s been pulled on all of us: each of those…
The dumbing of American political speech has truly apocalyptic implications
NPR reported it this morning, and I listened with rapt attention during my commute to work: It turns out that the sophistication of congressional speech-making is on the decline, according to the open government group the Sunlight Foundation. Since 2005, the average grade level at which members of Congress speak has fallen by almost a…
The ultimate apocalypse: George Carlin envisions the way the world might end
As you know, I’m very tuned into the doom meme, and I write and tweet a lot about past and current cultural variations on the fear and fascination of apocalypse. But I think I’ll never outdo George Carlin, who, in an absolutely brain-bending and jaw-dropping riff on the subject (see the video below), mounted the…
Recommended Reading 8
This week’s link list is slightly shorter than usual, because my time and energy have been dominated for the past few days by the task of writing three essays for ABC-CLIO’s “Enduring Questions” academic reference database, in the enticingly titled category, “World Religions: Belief, Culture, and Controversy.” But there’s still plenty of worthwhile reading here,…
‘The Twilight Zone’ for teachers: ‘Changing of the Guard’
In 1962 The Twilight Zone ran an episode titled “The Changing of the Guard.” It starred Donald Pleasence (in his first American television appearance) as an elderly literature professor who is forced into retirement and decides to kill himself on Christmas Eve when he’s overcome by the sense that his entire life and career have…
New Outer Limits: “Stream of Consciousness”
If you, like me, are feeling more and more haunted in our information-glutted age of universal online connectedness by T.S. Eliot’s famous lines “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” then maybe you’ll find this 1997 episode from Season 3 of The New Outer…