The NecronomiCon, long known as the greatest of all Lovecraft conventions, is going on in Providence even as I type these words. A huge number of my friends in the Lovecraftian realm are there, and I’m presently experiencing severe pangs of regret at being unable to attend. Here’s some consolation, though. Steve Ahlquist has done…
Tag: Books
Teeming Links – August 23, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s invocation comes from author and cultural historian Mike Jay, author of last year’s The Influencing Machine, slated for U.S. publication in January 2014 as A Visionary Madness. The article’s tagline states the basic thesis, which articulates an uncanny experience, sensation, and intuition that we’ve all had with…
‘A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius’ (Free ebook)
A COURSE IN DEMONIC CREATIVITY is a writer’s guide to working with the muse, daimon, or genius — the inner “other” that feels like a separate, autonomous intelligence.
Teeming Links – August 20, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Did somebody say “apocalypse”? Oh, yeah: that was me, here, all the time. And it was also, as it turns out, everybody, everywhere these days. To preface the current roundup of recommended and necessary reading, here’s a rich reflection on this very fact, and on the deeper meanings…
Teeming Links – August 13, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net I invite you to peruse today’s installment of recommended and necessary reading in light of this recent reflection from Walter Kirn, who says his former personal and current authorial involvement with a certain high-profile murderer and impostor has combined synergistically with the rash of apocalyptic awfulness currently infesting…
C. S. Lewis, Narnia, and mythic truth: “Stories are mirrors that show us our soul”
From a splendid essay by young adult novelist Zu Vincent and creative writing teacher Kiara Koenig, published in Through the Wardrobe: Your Favorite Authors on C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (2010), about the exquisite philosophical-spiritual value of finding solace, solitude, and authentic meaning in fictional stories amid our contemporary culture of scientistic disenchantment and…
How reading and literature effectively reincarnate us into a higher form of consciousness
From Mark Edmundson, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, a passionate paean to the college English major as a field of study that is ultimately devoted to “pursuing the most important subject of all — being a human being”: Soon college students all over America will be trundling to their advisers’ offices to choose…
Teeming Links – August 2, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net I invite you to peruse today’s offering of necessary and recommended reading under the overarching emotional/conceptual rubric of this recent rumination about the extreme value of ambivalence and undecidedness amid our present sociocultural circumstance of frenetic and manipulative opinion-peddling and belief-mongering: We live in a society in which…
Shirley Jackson: Witchcraft, madness, and the uncanny dangers of writing
From a long and uncommonly engrossing essay by Victoria Best at Open Letters Monthly about the relationship between life, art, madness, and the occult in the work and person of Shirley Jackson: She believed [writing] had a protective function, too, a kind of mental hygiene that allowed her to be herself: “The very nicest thing…
Teeming Links – July 30, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net To preface today’s offering of recommended and required reading, here’s a not-so-idle speculation from Damien Walter about the momentous fact of our collective cultural obsession with losing ourselves in the ever more immersive fantasy worlds that digital technology has enabled for us: I am a writer and critic…