[UPDATE May 2014: The article described here is no longer available online (nor is the Demon Muse blog). A slightly abridged version of it can be found in the book Daimonic Imagination: Uncanny Intelligence, edited by Angela Voss and William Rowlandson (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). The same version can also be found in Paranthropology, Vol….
Category: Writing & Creativity
You and Your Need for a Muse
Lateral Action, the very popular and influential (and excellent) creativity-and-productivity website run by writer and career/creativity coach Mark McGuinness, has published an article by me about the role of the muse in creative work. Yes, this complements the work I’m doing at my other blog, Demon Muse. Here’s the upshot, from the article’s conclusion: We’ve…
Jimmy Webb says Ray Bradbury and SF taught him how to write beautiful lyrics
How very unexpected, and how absolutely fascinating: songwriter Jimmy Webb, who’s responsible for a boatload of modern pop classics (and much more; he hates being branded as a “middle-of-the-road pop-music writer”), is a deep-thinking science fiction fan who says he learned a lot of his lyric-writing panache from Ray Bradbury. I’ve long felt like I…
A New Blog: Demon Muse
[UPDATE, August 2013: I recently closed Demon Muse because of repeated hacks. The ebook that I produced from material published there, A Course in Demonic Creativity, is now available here at The Teeming Brain.] I’ve started a new blog titled Demon Muse. Its dedicated topic is the daimonic model of creativity and human selfhood. Here’s…
9/11, writer’s block, and creative rebirth
In a July column for NPR about the enduring meaningfulness of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 for her life and work, Alice Hoffman revealed the following: After 9/11, I experienced serious writer’s block. Like so many, I had lost faith in the future. If our world was so perilous, if buildings could tumble and planes fall…
Nietzsche on the horror of existence
[NOTE: For another post about Nietzsche and horror, see “Nietzsche: Loving existence even though it’s horrifying and absurd.”] Every lover of books can narrate a personal history of his or her encounters with books and authors whose influence proved to be life-changing. For me, the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is one of those…
The scholar as poet, and vice versa
Here’s wishing a happy 2007 to whoever’s reading this. The holiday break is now over and I’m back in my classroom, typing these words on my lunch hour. In the past I’ve been seriously and dramatically demotivated about the imminent resumption of my teaching duties after a brief break, but none of them compares to…
The Daemon is someone inside you
Apologies for my failure yesterday to make my regular Monday blog post. I really have no excuse, especially since I was off work yesterday due to last week’s winter storm that has resulted in several days of school cancellations. Today we’re in our fourth day of this unexpected vacation, with a return to work tomorrow…
The inner locus of creative inspiration
Last Monday I was the subject of an author chat at The Lost and the Damned. I think it went pretty well. I certainly enjoyed myself, and a small crowd showed up to pick my brain about topics that proved quite interesting to me. I just hope my answers proved equally interesting to them. A…
Dæmonyx: What’s in a name?
For the past year and a half I’ve been recording music with a mind toward publishing a CD. In that time I’ve returned frequently to the question of what I should name my musical project. Right from the start I knew the name would have to be something centered around the idea of the daimonic…