William Barrett concluded his masterful 1958 study and interpretation of existentialist philosophy, Irrational Man, with words that still give me a shiver of recognition whenever I revisit them. What he says marked me as deeply when I first read it in the early/mid-1990s as the discovery of Ligotti’s fiction did a couple of years later….
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.
Steven Pressfield: God Designed the World with Monsters. Your Daimon Is One of Them.
Steve Pressfield, in his book The Artist’s Journey: The human race lost something, I believe, when it passed from the ancient world to the modern. The ancients understood the monstrous. They were not appalled by it, as we are. The legends of the ancient world are packed with monsters — Medusa, Cerberus, the Minotaur. Even…
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Philosophy of a Cosmos of Ideas
Fascinating stuff from philosophy and literature professor Peter Cheyne, writing for Aeon magazine: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stands tall in the cultural pantheon for his poetry. It’s less well known that in his own lifetime, and in the decades following his death, this canonical poet had an equal reputation as a philosopher. . . ….
The Hidden Horrors of Meditation
David Kortava in Harper’s Magazine: At the time [she signed up for a meditation retreat in rural Delaware], Megan’s life was in flux—she had just gone through a breakup and decided to move to Utah, where she planned to work on an organic farm. Ten days of meditation sounded restorative, a way of turning the…
Michio Kaku on the “terrible idea” of alien contact and the Buddhist Christianity of string theory
Two interesting excerpts from a recent Guardian interview with the famed Dr. Kaku in connection with his book The God Equation. On the prospect of meeting alien life: Soon we’ll have the Webb telescope up in orbit and we’ll have thousands of planets to look at, and that’s why I think the chances are quite…
Is Deepened Spirituality Incompatible with Writing?
In her sublime A Book of Silence, Sara Maitland describes an inner dilemma that she experienced during her experiments with silence and solitude. It’s a dilemma that has become highly personal for me as well: Then I noticed something shocking. I had come to Weardale for four conscious reasons: to study and think about silence,…
The Blog as Commonplace Book
In the “still here” post that I published last November to announce that I had managed to resurrect The Teeming Brain after a two-month site crash, I mentioned that I didn’t know what the future would hold for this blog in terms of new activity. That was not, of course, a particularly novel revelation. Long-time…
Still Here
Welcome (back) to The Teeming Brain! If you’ve stopped by at any time in the past two months, you’ve noticed that there hasn’t been much of anything going on around here. All TTB content — the blog posts, the interviews, the different pages — has been gone. For several weeks there was a stark placeholder…
PseudoPod production of my story “Teeth” (Part 1)
PseudoPod 721: Teeth – Part 1 PseudoPod has just published the first part of a two-part reading of my story “Teeth” (linked above). More than 20 years ago, this was my first published story, and now it has become my first story to be produced for an audio presentation. In what amounts to a two-decade…
Podcast interview: “The Fine Line between Horror and Religion”
The Monster Complex podcast has just published a new interview with me: The Fine Line between Horror and Religion In addition to the item named in the title, the conversation encompasses a number of related topics and tangents, including my thoughts on why there may never be a totally successful film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s…