Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net The presiding reflection for today’s offering of recommended and necessary reading and viewing comes from British novelist and essayist Tim Parks, who elicits an important truth about the silence that so many of us seek, or say we think we seek, amid a culture of clamor: Arguably, when…
Category: Psychology & Consciousness
How reading and literature effectively reincarnate us into a higher form of consciousness
From Mark Edmundson, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, a passionate paean to the college English major as a field of study that is ultimately devoted to “pursuing the most important subject of all — being a human being”: Soon college students all over America will be trundling to their advisers’ offices to choose…
Shirley Jackson: Witchcraft, madness, and the uncanny dangers of writing
From a long and uncommonly engrossing essay by Victoria Best at Open Letters Monthly about the relationship between life, art, madness, and the occult in the work and person of Shirley Jackson: She believed [writing] had a protective function, too, a kind of mental hygiene that allowed her to be herself: “The very nicest thing…
Book Review: ‘The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness” by Alan Watts
Alan Watts has long been one of my foundational philosophical influences. I think his writing style, famed for its almost preternatural lucidity and grace, has also influenced me by giving me a model to emulate. “Nobody could write like Watts, nobody,” Ken Wilber once observed in an interview for ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and…
Teeming Links – July 26, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net As you browse through today’s crop of fascinating, worthwhile, disturbing, and necessary reading, I invite you to consider not just this particular experience but your online experience as a whole in light of writer Benjamin Anastasis’ recent, impassioned, and insightful explanation of why he has abandoned Twitter. Even…
Horror, the muse, and inspired madmen: My full introduction to Joe Pulver’s ‘Portraits of Ruin’
Full text of Matt Cardin’s introduction to PORTRAITS OF RUIN by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Teeming Links – July 19, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Locking Out the Voices of Dissent (Truthdig) Chris Hedges on how the security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising….
Meditation, the daimon muse, and the I Ching
Several thousand people have now downloaded my free e-book A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius (formerly available at Demon Muse, which I have now shut down because of repeated hacks and security breaches). There’s obviously a widespread interest in the idea, experience, and practice of what feels like inner…
Teeming Links – July 12, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net This week, a change in format: The Teeming Brain’s long-running “Recommended Reading” series will henceforth be titled “Teeming Links.” It will also shift to a streamlined format that does away with the former practice of including extensive excerpts and publication information from the linked items. I want to…
Lovecraft, Tolkien, and the nightmare as “a necessary drug for the mass consciousness”
Here’s a description of the book Nightmare: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project (Brill, 2013) by Russian-born literary and cultural scholar Dina Khapaeva, who is currently serving as chair of the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech: What is a nightmare as a psychological experience, a literary experiment and a cultural project? Why has…