[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…
Google CEO Worries that Google Is Making Us Stupid
Okay, so the headline I gave to this post is a bit slanted for rhetorical effect. When Eric Schmidt, Google’s 54-year-old chief execusive and chairman, spoke last Friday, January 29 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he didn’t actually repeat and respond to the question contained in the sensationalistic headline of Nicholas Carr’s…
Sleep Paralysis: The ultimate horror
I’m just going to share these YouTube movie previews with minimal comment, since I have already talked here in the past about my experiences with sleep paralysis. If you’ve never experienced it, be advised that sleep paralysis really is as thoroughly and deeply shattering as the people in these videos make it out to be….
Our task: Envisioning and creating a new relationship with money
The following comes from a truly wonderful Jan. 25 essay by Charles Leadbeater at New Statesman titled “The best things in life are free.” No comment necessary, other than to express gratitude for such a lucid and moving exposition of a truth so crucial it hurts (and one that’s just as true for the U.S….
Gloom Is Good: The Rise of the New Pessimists
“Greed is good,” Gordon Gekko told us in 1987 (echoing and perhaps parodying Ayn Rand‘s long-running, uber-egoistic economic cant). For all we know, he may be gearing up to deliver us a repackaged version of the same message later this year when Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps hits theaters. But regardless of what Gekko’s…
What I read in 2009
In 2009 I accomplished something in my life as a reader that I had never before accomplished: I kept a list — I’m talking about a full list — of everything I read. Not just books, but short fiction, poetry, and — in the most gargantuan category of all — articles, essays, and reviews. I…
Interview: The spirituality of George Romero’s zombie movies
I’ve just been interviewed by TheoFantastique, the excellent website devoted to examining the religious resonances of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. In “Spirituality in Romero’s Living Dead Films” (Dec. 3), TheoFantastique’s proprietor, John Morehead, quizzes me about my academic paper “Loathsome Objects: George Romero’s Living Dead Films as Contemplative Tools,” which appears in my forthcoming…
Thomas Ligotti’s horror aesthetic mirrored by — Rob Zombie?
My readers know it’s no secret that I’m compulsively fascinated by the work of literary horror master Thomas Ligotti. As I’ve explained here in the past, I’m also compulsively fascinated by horrorific musical icon and now horror cinema auteur Rob Zombie, for reasons that are more obscure to me. The two fascinations would seem to…
Collapse goes mainstream: MSM attention to new film COLLAPSE is attention-worthy itself
I started reading Mike Ruppert about five years ago. As is true for many other people, the man played a major part in my personal introduction to peak oil theory and its global implications — “global” both literally and metaphorically, not only in terms of PO’s worldwide and cross-national scope and impact but in terms…
Zombies, Digital Media, and Cultural Preservation in the New Dark Age
“How secure is our civilization’s accumulated knowledge?” That’s the question posed in a recent essay by Richard Heinberg, one of the most consistently brilliant, reasonable, and nuanced writers about the ecological and cultural-civilizational ramifications of peak fossil fuels and economic calamity. In “Our evanescent culture and the awesome duty of librarians,” he offers a detailed…