In the latest entry in “By Heart,” an article series from The Atlantic “in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature,” novelist Benjamin Percy, author of the just-released werewolf novel Red Moon, talks about the deep and permanent emotional impact that he experienced from reading a certain passage in Cormac McCarthy’s…
Pentagon claims domestic authority “to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances”
Is it just me, or is this profoundly disturbing? No, it’s not just me. From the Long Island Press, May 14: The manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects offered the nation a window into the stunning military-style capabilities of our local law enforcement agencies. For the past 30 years, police departments throughout the United…
Mary Shelley: Mother to the monster
And speaking — as I did just yesterday — of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, here’s author and history professor Michael Saler discussing two new books about Ms. Shelley and her novel (The Annotated Frankenstein and The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelleyâs Masterpiece)for The…
Paranormal orbs and the dark side of Phil Collins
One of the defining societal and psychological traits of electric media culture, stretching back many decades, is its collective wholesale infatuation with the cult of celebrity, which is of course a severely debased form of traditional hero worship. For a surprisingly riveting look behind the curtain and smokescreen of the whole sorry phenomenon, see the…
Frankenstein wept: Algorithms unleashed, Matrix rising
Here’s British author and journalist Steven Poole, writing for Aeon magazine in an article published just today and titled “Slaves to the Algorithm“: Our age elevates the precision-tooled power of the algorithm over flawed human judgment. From web search to marketing and stock-trading, and even education and policing, the power of computers that crunch data…
Homer, Tolkien, and the ontology of visionary states in a materialist age
In his new book The Shamanic Odyssey: Homer, Tolkien, and the Visionary Experience, English professor, writer, and classical guitarist Robert Tindall, writing with psychology professor and transpersonal psychotherapist Susana Bustos, “Weav[es] together the narrative traditions of the ancient Greeks and Celts, the mythopoetic work of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the voices of plant medicine…
Recommended Reading 40
In this installment: A report on the new type of futurism that’s being spearheaded by highly regarded scientists and scholars for the purpose of studying the reality and scope of existential threats to human survival. The triumph of fear as a central motivating reality in contemporary geopolitics. The global plague of feral pigs. Renowned author…
Unnamable but Not Undrawable: The World of Lovecraftian Superheroes
A Search for the Heroic in Lovecraftian Fiction, Part Three In Part One of this series I set out to demonstrate that it’s possible to find aspects of optimism and heroism in H. P. Lovecraft’s stories. In Part Two I looked at how a number of other writers, and also filmmakers — including Robert E….
Orson Welles on Chartres Cathedral, authorship, and the purpose of human existence
And this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole Western world, and it’s without a signature: Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked radish. There aren’t any…
Art, creativity, fate, and the end of the world: Revisiting Joseph Campbell
When The Power of Myth, the six-part PBS television series featuring Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell, first broke upon the unsuspecting American public in 1988, it became an instant sensation and Campbell became an instant celebrity (I mean in a pop cultural sense, beyond and in addition to the substantial academic fame he had already…