Recently published at the online Trebuchet Magazine, which “champions contemporary art, activist politics, and ecstatic music” and strives to be “A creative magazine minus the lifestyle upsell,” this brief and astute analysis of Lovecraft cuts right to the heart of his deep and enduring appeal as a visionary supernatural horror writer whose works resonate with an…
Tag: literature
John Gray on ghosts, Walter de la Mare, and the limits of scientific materialism
The relationship between supernatural horror and scientific materialism is a neverendingly fascinating subject, not least because the enormous and ongoing popularity of supernatural horror stories among the thoroughly secularized Western consumerist democracies, where scientific materialism has a cultural stranglehold, represents a striking philosophical fault line. One may say, as everybody from H. P. Lovecraft to…
Coins for the Ferryman: Horror as the Key to Our Dark Inner Depths
The analysis of Horror is, like almost everything else related to the genre, paradoxical. Because the genre is so rife with archetypal imagery and taboo subjects, it seems that any attempt to rationalize or understand it in purely intellectual terms is ineffectual, or at the very least inadequate. Whereas most other forms of artistic expression…
The meaning of horror and “that dark sorcerer” Cormac McCarthy (with nods to Ligotti)
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…
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…
In Praise of Horror that Horrifies
The Horror genre can evoke a panorama of emotions in its audience. Dread, lust, anxiety, giddiness, and even joy often arise, sometimes in paradoxical combinations. Peculiarly enough, it seems that the one emotion the genre evokes most rarely is the one from which its name is derived. In plain speaking, the genre is rarely frightening….
Literature makes you weird. Its gift is the uncanny.
In a previous Teeming Brain post (one that has received a steady inflow of visitors ever since I first published it in 2009), I talked about the magical/alchemical power of language in general and poetic language in particular: [T]here’s a positively magical power in language, particularly in the poetic use of it, since language enables…
The power of a memorized poem
Here are some wise and lovely thoughts on the deep value of memorizing poetry from NYU English professor Catherine Robson, author of Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. It may be tempting to lament the passing of an era when one and all were seemingly united by a joint stock of poetic knowledge…
The Teeming Brain Podcast #1: “Cosmic Horror vs. Sacred Terror”
PLAY IT: Listen now (92 min.): https://www.teemingbrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Teeming_Brain_podcast_001_Cosmic_Horror_vs_Sacred_Terror-1.mp3 Download mp3: Cosmic Horror vs. Sacred Terror DESCRIPTION: Do nihilism and cosmic meaningfulness stand in fundamental tension with each other at the heart of the horror genre? Were Lovecraft and Machen getting at fundamentally different moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical points with their respective horror stories? Does the (possible)…
William Golding: “Words may prove to be the most powerful thing in the world”
Story will always be with us. But story in a physical book, in a sentence what the West means by “a novel” — what of that? Certainly, if the form fails let it go. We have enough complications in life, in art, in literature without preserving dead forms fossilised, without cluttering ourselves with Byzantine sterilities….