Thomas Ligotti’s “Ghost Stories for the Dead” first appeared in 1982 in the second issue of the small press horror magazine Grimoire. It opened with an epigraph drawn from E. M. Cioran: “That faint light in each of us which dates back before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if…
Category: Arts & Entertainment
On limiting your speech to protect your art
From a 1956 profile of Edward Hopper in Time magazine, here’s an arresting illustration of single-minded dedication to one’s art by deliberately embracing silence and limiting one’s self-expression in other forms to avoid careless leaks of creative vision and energy: Offered a gold medal by the National Institute of Arts and Letters last year, Hopper…
Horror Movies, Transcendence, and a Symbiosis between the Demonic and the Divine
Here’s Will H. Rockett, in his book Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty, saying things that affected and influenced me deeply in the 1990s when I was first divining the nexus of responsiveness that I had recognized within myself to intimations of religious transcendence both divine and demonic, beatific and horrifying,…
Everything Is More Beautiful Because We’re Doomed
The Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi has become something of a fashionable rage in America during the past few years, partly as an attitudinal accompaniment to the cultural influx of Kondo-style decluttering (Marie Kondo has said she’s partly inspired by wabi-sabi) and its interaction with the trendy rise of a minimalist aesthetic. Wabi-sabi refers to…
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. . . ….
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…
Tori Amos on serving the muses: “You have to get yourself out of the way”
With my long-running investigations into the experience of inspired creativity in the mode of the muse, the daimon/daemon, and the genius, I was interested to see this theme getting a big shout-out in the mainstream press in connection with the publication of Tori Amos’s new memoir, Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change, and Courage….
Jonathan Franzen on literature as the key to a deeper life
From an interview with Franzen by Jianan Qian in The Millions: TM: You also mentioned on a number of occasions that literature saved you. Could you elaborate on the notion of literary salvation? JF: What would I have meant by that? I don’t think it literally saved my life. TM: I suppose it’s not that…
Quantum physics, cultural madness, and the Azathoth paradigm
Apparently, working from home during the current disruption and suspension of all normal activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic is leaving me too much time and mental space for reflection. Please pardon me while I ill-advisedly correlate some contents and piece together some dissociated knowledge. Bernardo Kastrup in Scientific American: [A]s Kuhn pointed out, when…