Many of my readers are die-hard fans, students, and spiritual children of H.P. Lovecraft, so with that in mind I thought I’d give a heads up about the launch of a cool and interesting new online arts publication in Boston’s North Shore, which is, of course, right where Lovecraft located a substantial portion of his…
An Economic Day of Reckoning for America’s Colleges
Interesting video from The Chronicle of Higher Education showing speakers and attendees at the Chronicle‘s Leadership Forum, held on June 7-8 in Washington, D.C., hashing over the question of just how worried colleges ought to be about the economy, and how they ought to respond to the crisis. Their bottom line: Brace for serious change….
Religion, voluntary poverty, and cultural survival in an age of collapse
Or actually, what I present here are quotes of the day, plural. Both are from John Michael Greer, he of the liquid prose and fearsome erudition, and one of the most important writers about the civilizational trajectory we’re pursuing right now. [Toynbee’s insight] that religion very often serves as the conduit by which the cultural…
The last generation’s successes become the next generation’s problems
An interesting recent article from The Chronicle of Higher Education that explains one effect of California’s epic budget crisis on its college system spells out a principle with much wider applications for our culture and civilization at large. “California’s ‘Gold Standard’ for Higher Education Falls Upon Hard Times” (June 15) explains how the fabled California…
Kunstler channels Lovecraft, or, Cosmic Decay in Upstate New York
How very, very fascinating to see James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand, and one of contemporary America’s most visible, forceful, caustic, and eloquent prophets of doom (via peak oil, economic collapse, climate change, and more), turning to none other than H.P. Lovecraft for a properly evocative literary reference…
Nietzsche: Loving existence even though it’s horrifying and absurd
A review of Keith Ansell Pearson’s How to Read Nietzsche (2005) at The Journal of Nietzsche Studies features the following paragraph, which, with its focus on Nietzsche and its description of a worldview based on tragedy and horror, is a quintessential example of the type of writing that has unfailingly arrested me with a hypnotic…
The Human Race at a Crossroads
Guy McPherson, professor of conservation biology at the University of Arizona, pulls no punches in his May 21 essay, “Humanity at a crossroads.” In fact, he begins with his punchline itself: The evidence is gaining increasing clarity: We’ve reached a crossroads unlike any other in human history. One path leads to despair for Homo industrialis….
Original music for Conrad Aiken’s “Silent Snow, Secret Snow”
A couple of years ago I composed some original music to accompany a recorded reading of Conrad Aiken’s sublime 1934 short story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” about a young boy named Paul who grows progressively more lost in the delusion of a silently falling snow that slowly envelopes his world. The music didn’t make it…
Frightening secrets of a deeper life
A dose of really astute psychological insight from Hawthorne: The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one . . . . Truth…
Learning the value of pessimism from ancient Stoics and Christians
Here’s the perfect reality check for all of the current ill-conceived hopes for a swift economic “recovery,” defined as a return to our previous bubblicious state of unfettered (and, as it turned out, fake) economic growth and “greed is good”-induced cultural mania: “For a happier life, shake off your misplaced optimism” — Financial Times, April…