Before the links, a brief screed that arose spontaneously from some well in my psyche: If you’re a writer or another type of creator, never compare your gift to that of others. Your particular gift of vision, subject matter, passion, skill level, style, approach, and the life circumstances in which these all exist and unfold…
Tag: humanities
Teeming Links – June 13, 2014
In a truly horrific instance of mythic and memetic madness, Slender Man has now inspired two teens to try and murder a friend and (apparently) a daughter to try and murder her mother. For those who aren’t aware, Slenderman is “perhaps the Internet’s best and scariest legend,” a daemonic/demonic monster that was created in full…
Teeming Links – September 13, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Far Away from Solid Modernity (Revolution: Global Trends and Regional Issues) Zygmunt Bauman on liquid modernity and our unfolding apocalypse. “[We live in a society] which, moving relentlessly towards the apocalypse, does not care (does not want to care or is not able to) about the security and…
Deadly pedantry: How (and how not) to murder art, literature, and H. P. Lovecraft
The “practical beginner’s guide” to H. P. Lovecraft that I published here last month has received a lot of attention and traffic, but not all of it has been necessarily positive. One observer, Teeming Brain regular xylokopos, commented, “What is the point of this detailed, beforehand investigation into the man’s life and correspondence[?] . ….
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…
The library as cultural memory bank
I found it important to begin by reminding my audience what a library essentially is: a memory bank. Only thanks to the existence of libraries are we able, as a culture and as a society, to keep remembering our own past. But libraries do much more than just looking back, in nostalgia or otherwise, at…