Nanette Fabray, the legendary American television actress, singer, comedienne, and advocate for the hearing impaired, has died at the age of 97. Fifty years ago last month, she (and The Carol Burnett Show) provided just over two minutes of the most amazingly quiet and mesmerizing programming in the history of American broadcast television. These two…
Category: Arts & Entertainment
The man who invented the Internet didn’t foresee our Neuromancer/Black Mirror future
The following insights are excerpted from a brief but engaging NPR piece that traces the cultural arc from Vint Cerf (the “inventor of the Internet”) and his early naive optimism about this new technology, to William Gibson’s uncanny prescience in forecasting exactly where the Internet would really take us (to a corporate-controlled cyberdystopia with sharply…
Philip Roth on the value of serious literature amid the hellscape of contemporary America
Philip Roth, 1973 Here’s Nathaniel Rich, writing for The New York Review of Books about Philip Roth’s Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960â2013: Between the interviews given in self-defense, the conversations with peers, and the exchanges with angry Jews, there emerges from Rothâs nonfiction a unified theory of the novel as a bulwark against the excesses…
Kickstarter campaign for “Vastarien: A Literary Journal”
Some time ago here at The Teeming Brain, I announced the birth of a new literary journal titled Vastarien, to be edited by Jon Padgett and me, and to be framed as “a source of critical study and creative response to the corpus of Thomas Ligotti as well as associated authors and ideas.” We…
The centering power of reading in an age of mass distraction
If reading is not always an act of liberation, it is at least an act of self-definition. It is an experience of solitude in which we become unavailable to those immediately around us. Even when we read to someone else, usually a lover or a child, or have them read to us, the effect is…
A Golden Ghoul Award for “Horror Literature through History”
Dejan Ognjanovic, who runs the prominent Serbian horror blog The Cult of Ghoul, has given Horror Literature through History a 2018 Golden Ghoul Award for best non-fiction horror book of 2017. You can read the complete awards list (in Serbian) at the blog.
Do the moral failings of artists mean we have to reject their art?
A newly published op-ed by Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty is well worth reading for its nuanced response to the current crisis of falling idols in the world of arts and entertainment. Given my personal literary leanings, I find McNulty’s points to be nicely applicable to the case of someone he doesn’t name:…
A starred review of “Horror Literature through History” from Booklist
Booklist has weighed in with a starred review of my Horror Literature through History: The fan and the scholar alike will find much of use in this fun, well-organized two-volume reference set. Cardin (Mummies around the World, 2014) looks at horror literature with the broadest lens possible, considering not just its history but also its…
Brilliant: This one-minute short film about a prepper’s dream coming true
This one-minute film by neophyte French filmmaker Gaspar Palacio is just brilliant. And I don’t use that word lightly. It’s like a master class in cinematic microfiction. Here’s how Palacio describes it at Vimeo: The one minute tale of a survivalist. When the siren rings in the distance, a family has to get inside the…
My interview for This Is Horror – Part Two
Here’s the second and final part of my recent interview for the This Is Horror podcast. Co-hosts Michael David Wilson and Bob Pastorella conducted the whole thing skillfully, so hats off to them. Readers who have followed the saga of the birth of Horror Literature through History may be especially interested to hear that I…