Who would have thought it? None other than Joan Collins, one of the living symbols of a former era in mass entertainment culture, deplores the catastrophic collapse of taste, intelligence, and attention span that’s been spawned by the current tabloid-ized version of that very world. Just check out this excerpt from a recent interview in…
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Spiritual investment in the age of financial disaster
Greetings, Teeming Brainers. I’m back from attending the 29th annual Armadillocon in Austin, Texas, where I spoke on several panels (and served as moderator for one of them, which was a new experience) and enjoyed hobnobbing with various writers, editors, and fans of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative literature. It was a nice time overall….
Anna Nicole Smith Is the Fourth Horseman
The only daily newspaper that originates from my part of the world is The News-Leader, which is located in Springfield, Missouri. It blankets southwest Missouri and part of Arkansas. Last Tuesday, February 13th, editorial page editor Tony Messenger posted a brief observation at his blog, “Ozarks Messenger,” titled “A sign of the apocalypse…” It read…
Planet of the Dead, or Is dehumanization so bad?
One of the most nightmarish things about a dark age is the degradation that it entails for life’s overall tone, not least in the dehumanization that occurs when a people’s intellectual, emotional, moral, spiritual, political, social, and cultural life in general is reduced to a ghastly level of brutishness and ignorance. As is now plainly…
War, torture, and the failure of the American experiment
Once again, an online conversation has elicited enough words from me that I’ve realized they would make for a good blog post. A word of warning, though: I’m afraid it reads like a sermon or lecture. And a rambling one at that. Or worse, it may read like a one-sided conversation — which indeed it…
Jihad vs. McWorld: The trouble with radical Islam
To begin with, a proviso: I probably don’t know what I’m talking about here. I’m certainly not a political scientist. I may not even qualify as a reasonably informed citizen. But anyway… A little over a week ago, back on September 10th, the online arm of The Guardian published a long essay by Martin Amis…
High tide for anti-intellectualism
This post is in response to a query somebody made at the Shocklines forum. In various conversations at that board, people have recently been mentioning a supposed surge of anti-intellectualism in America today. One person responded with the following: I’ve been hearing a lot about this ‘wave of anti-intellectualism’. I’m curious about it. All artistic…
Welcome to the Teeming Brain
Hello and welcome to The Teeming Brain! My name is Matt Cardin and the brain in question is my own, which indeed teems with thoughts, impressions, and creative impulses. This blog is a tool that I’ve created to help me glean it. By way of introducing myself—and this information is of course archived on the…