Apparently, working from home during the current disruption and suspension of all normal activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic is leaving me too much time and mental space for reflection. Please pardon me while I ill-advisedly correlate some contents and piece together some dissociated knowledge. Bernardo Kastrup in Scientific American: [A]s Kuhn pointed out, when…
Tag: h. p. lovecraft
Autumn Longing: Alan Watts
Yesterday, I came across a passage in a book by Alan Watts that reignited an old passion for what I have referred to in the past as “the autumn longing.” In a kind of “deep cut” vein for this blog, longtime readers — by which I mean really longtime readers, those who have been with…
Teeming Links – March 8, 2019
Has it really been more than a year since I published a Teeming Links post? It would seem so. The last one is dated October 2017. Chalk it up to the fact that I’m deep into a Ph.D. and now buried in my dissertation. And also the fact that 2018 was the most insane race-to-the-finish-line…
Do the moral failings of artists mean we have to reject their art?
A newly published op-ed by Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty is well worth reading for its nuanced response to the current crisis of falling idols in the world of arts and entertainment. Given my personal literary leanings, I find McNulty’s points to be nicely applicable to the case of someone he doesn’t name:…
The Folio Society’s new edition of Lovecraft’s stories looks gorgeous (and eldritch)
The gorgeous-looking new edition of Lovecraft’s stories from The Folio Society, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, has this really effective (and kind of gorgeous in its own right) promotional video to go with it. Sadly, I don’t have $120 to spare. But with illustrations by Dan Hillier — who comes off quite…
‘The Starry Wisdom Library’ becomes an audiobook
Remember The Starry Wisdom Library, that unique Lovecraftian book project helmed by rare books expert Nate Pedersen, released by PS Publishing in 2014, and containing my faux scholarly commentary on the imaginary occult tome titled Daemonolorum, along with a plethora of similar fake commentary on other imaginary occult books by the likes of Ramsey Campbell,…
Huston Smith and H. P. Lovecraft on transcendent longing and humanity’s fundamental dis-ease
From Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief by Huston Smith: The traditional worldview is preferable to the one that now encloses us because it allows for the fulfillment of the basic longing that lies in the depth of the human heart. . . . There is within…
Projects in progress
To quote Pink Floyd: Is there anybody out there? Three days from now will mark six full months since my last Teeming Brain post. Experienced readers of this blog might well surmise that my conflicted relationship with the Internet has been gaining more and more distance over time. These readers would be correct. A number…
Teeming Links – May 1, 2015
Don’t say you weren’t warned: artificial telepathy might turn out to be a nightmare. “Will the next generation of telepathy machines make us closer, or are there unforeseen dangers in the melding of minds?” (Aeon) What is the future of loneliness in the age of the Internet? “As we moved our lives online, the internet…
What if God is horrifying?
Yes, of course, this is a topic that I have broached many times before. But this recent — and fantastically brilliant — video from The Onion brought it roaring back to the forefront of my thoughts. (Hat tip to J. F. Martel for alerting me to it.) And of course that reminded me of —…