Full text of Matt Cardin’s introduction to PORTRAITS OF RUIN by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Jimmy Carter speaks out on NSA scandal and more: “America has no functioning democracy”
I just caught wind of this, and I find it to be entirely worth bringing to the attention of anybody who hasn’t heard about it. In a word: wow. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter is so concerned about the NSA spying scandal that he thinks it has essentially resulted in a suspension of American democracy….
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….
Deadly pedantry: How (and how not) to murder art, literature, and H. P. Lovecraft
The “practical beginner’s guide” to H. P. Lovecraft that I published here last month has received a lot of attention and traffic, but not all of it has been necessarily positive. One observer, Teeming Brain regular xylokopos, commented, “What is the point of this detailed, beforehand investigation into the manâs life and correspondence[?] . ….
“In Praise of Shadows”: Morris Berman’s acceptance speech for the 2013 Neil Postman Award
Last month Morris Berman delivered a speech titled “In Praise of Shadows” as he accepted this year’s Neil Postman Award for Public Intellectual Activity.
“Lovecraftian horror at its best”: Don Webb reviews Richard Gavin’s ‘At Fear’s Altar’
What tangled web of eldritch synchronicities is this!? In 2006 I reviewed Richard Gavin’s strong first collection of supernatural/numinous horror fiction, Omens, for the journal Dead Reckonings. In the years after that, Richard and I forged a good online friendship. In 2011 he and I, and also our fellow horror scribe Simon Strantzas, roomed together…
Americans: Wild about apocalypse
This fine little BBC video presents an able summary of the central role that the idea of the apocalypse has played in American history right from its earliest beginnings. It effectively serves as a summary of and introduction to the 2012 book The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us about America…
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…
Doris Lessing on storytellers as myth-makers: “Our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world”
From Doris Lessing’s lecture in acceptance of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature: We are a jaded lot, we in our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost…
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…