Powerful insights from Ed Simon, Editor-at-Large for LARB’s Marginalia, in an essay for The Millions in which he not only traces a history of hauntedness in various key works of literature (by the likes of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, Morrison, Chambers, Lovecraft, and King) but relates a couple of his own genuinely weird personal encounters with…
Tag: Ghosts
Teeming Links – May 2, 2014
Anatomy of the Deep State (absolutely required reading): “There is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose…
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…
Recommended Reading 28
This week: posthumously offered words of warning and encouragement to an America in decline from Ernest Callenbach, author of the 1975 classic Ecotopia; insightful meditations on the intrinsic value of the humanities and their inherent resistance to being explained (as in, explained away) by quantitative scientific methodologies and approaches; a 1908 essay by a French…
“Thatâs a Man Standing There Solid As Me” – Some Reflections on the Nature of Ghosts
For a moment leave aside whether you believe or disbelieve in the existence of ghosts. Would you know one if you saw it? Once, I would have said yes. I would have had a picture in mind of a spectral figure — the familiar trope of popular media — or perhaps an orb, a shadowy…