Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net To preface today’s (short but dense) collection of recommended and necessary reading, here’s a lengthy opening word about the ultimate closing word — which is to say, several excerpts from a recent article about the upsurge of apocalyptic themes in American entertainment. As we all know, there’s been…
Category: Arts & Entertainment
Ray Bradbury: A life of mythic numinosity
Long-time Teeming Brain readers are well aware that Ray Bradbury frequently comes up in conversation here. Like so many other people, and as I detailed three years ago in “The October Mystique: 7 Authors on the Visionary Magic of Ray Bradbury,” I tend to think of him especially when October and the autumn season roll…
Dystopian fiction is barely keeping pace with bio-engineering reality
From a review essay on Margaret Atwood’s new novel MaddAddam, which completes her apocalyptic-dystopian trilogy that began in 2003 with Oryx and Crake: You can take your pick of Cassandras: Michael Crichton, Mary Shelley, whoever made Gattaca. Literature and pop culture never stop obsessing about the bastard spawn of technology and biology, although movies love…
Vampires, Frankenstein, and Alien Horror: The Dark Mirror Film Festival 2013
If you find yourself in Waco, Texas in October 2013 — specifically, on Friday, October 25 — and you’re in the mood to celebrate the Halloween horror season in style, be sure to come join us for the fourth annual Dark Mirror horror film festival. Four classic horror films. Informative introductory talks by vampire expert…
Womb of the Black Goddess: Horror as Dark Transcendence
During the recent NecronomiCon 2013 — a conference of all-things Lovecraftian held in HPL’s beloved Providence — I participated in a panel on weird fiction. During the lively and interesting discussion, the opinion was expressed that much weird or horrific fiction seems to be written from a “bleak existentialist perspective.” While that may well be…
On Stephen King and horror as “one of the most literary of all forms”
Here’s a really nice pair of paragraphs expressing a dead-on and truly significant point, from a review by Margaret Atwood (!) of King’s new novel Doctor Sleep, his much-heralded sequel to The Shining: King is right at the center of an American literary taproot that goes all the way down: to the Puritans and their…
Teeming Links – September 20, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening word comes from novelist and National Book Award winner Richard Powers, speaking to The Believer magazine in 2007 about the unique value of reading — and specifically, reading fiction — in helping to “deliver us from certainty” during an age when a great deal of evil…
Russell Brand: Don’t trust politicians, big business, or the media
Here’s Russell Brand, writing in The Guardian this past Friday the 13th about his recent experience at the GQ awards (from which he was ejected for cracking jokes about the event’s sponsor), and speaking some serious truth to, or rather about, power (with emphases added by me): What are politicians doing at Glastonbury and the…
Fandom & Fantasy: Exploring the Anomalous at Dragon Con
A living person is forgiven everything, except for being present among the dying ones of this world. “Oh, holiest sacrifice of the (children) of the unique one.” — Louis Cattiaux It is odd to step out of my personal reality and into a fantasy world much more mundane than the mere act of making…
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the dark-mythic summer of 1816
I’m presently teaching a sophomore college course about horror and science fiction in literature and film. (You can view the syllabus online.) Yesterday’s class meeting was devoted to introducing Mary Shelley and Frankenstein by giving background on Mary’s life and describing the epic, shadowy, amazing, uncanny, utterly mythic summer of 1816, when Mary stayed with…