A New Blog: Demon Muse

I’ve started a new blog titled Demon Muse. Its dedicated topic is the daimonic model of creativity and human selfhood.

Here’s a passage from the About page:

Demon Muse is about the unconscious mind — the muse, the daimon — and its role in artistic creativity. It’s about tapping into your “inner genius” and learning to let it guide you in discovering and doing the work that you were uniquely born to do. It’s written specifically for writers and other creative artists who are seeking to clarify their creativity, but the general principle it explores is valuable to everyone. The blog is updated every Monday (plus occasional bonus posts during the rest of the week) with new articles and essays exploring the psychology of creativity and techniques for tuning into your deep self and establishing a creative flow. It also features commentary on books and films that highlight the daimonic theory of creativity, and presents original interviews with successful creators who share their practical insights into the inner workings of the creative process. The focus is evenly divided between the theoretical — exploring the daimonic model of life, consciousness, and creativity for its pure informational value and inherent fascination — and practical — learning how to work productively with this knowledge.

Several posts are already live:

• Welcome to Demon Muse
• The Daimonic Insight: Creativity Is a Force Separate from You
• Steven Pressfield and Seth Godin: Artists and Innovators vs. The New Dark Age
• A Brief History of the Daimon (and the Genius)

As you can see, I’m using Demon Muse as a place to concentrate on one of my long-running interests that shows up in Dark Awakenings (in the Angel-Demon essay) and has popped up repeatedly here at The Teeming Brain.

I invite you to come on over and have a look around. If you like what you see, subscription options are clearly labeled at the site.

Image credit: Florian Siebeck, Wikipedia, under the GNU Free Documentation License

Google CEO Worries that Google Is Making Us Stupid

Google CEO Eric Schmidt speaking at a past World Economic Forum (2008)

Okay, so the headline I gave to this post is a bit slanted for rhetorical effect. When Eric Schmidt, Google’s 54-year-old chief execusive and chairman, spoke last Friday, January 29 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he didn’t actually repeat and respond to the question contained in the sensationalistic headline of Nicholas Carr’s 2008 Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.”

But, as reported by news outlets everywhere, he did voice some of the same concerns that Carr highlighted, and in very direct and forceful terms, too. Specifically, he expressed concern that today’s young people are experiencing serious impairment in their ability to perform “deep reading” as they grow up in our frenetic, buzzing, always-online environment of mobile electronic devices.

Even more specifically, he told his audience of world economic movers and shakers,

The one [thing] that I do worry about is the question of “deep reading”….As the world looks to these instantaneous devices…you spend less time reading all forms of literature, books, magazines and so forth….That probably has an effect on cognition, probably has an effect on reading.

Now that’s interesting! And it’s also — to give credit where scads are due — not all that surprising. Schmidt isn’t just mouthing these concerns, and his focus on them isn’t new. For instance, when he spoke in 2009 at the University of Pennsylvania’s commencement ceremony, he urged the new graduates to turn off their computers and discover the non-computerized world of human relationships and the natural environment.

And, interestingly, he may have been led at least in part to concentrate on such things by Carr’s very article, as recounted by Carr himself in a response to Schmidt’s Davos speech (“Eric Schmidt’s Second Thoughts,” Jan. 30). Carr traces how, first, Schmidt responded publicly to the “Stupid” article in 2008 by pointing out that people made the same ominous claims about plummeting intelligence levels and attention spans when color television was introduced, when MTV was launched, etc., and yet today “we’re smarter than ever.” But then a few months later, in early 2009, Schmidt told Charlie Rose,

I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.
 And I worry that we’re losing that.

And then came the Davos speech in early 2010.

Carr comments, “I’m glad Schmidt has continued to ponder this issue, and I salute him for having the courage to air his concerns publicly.”

To which I respond with a hearty “Ditto,” a thousand times over. For what it’s worth, I shamelessly love Google’s search engine, and have found myself deriving lots of benefit from some of its associated tools over the past year and two (Calendar, Reader, et al.). So I certainly can’t bash the company with a straight face. But its Leviathan-like rise to dominance is certainly valid cause for concern. A host of troubling moral questions arise from Google’s pervasive influence, as seen in its de facto ability to make or break businesses and companies with a mere tweak of its search algorithm, its veritably one-handed role in giving rise to SEO as a dominant marketing concern, its inherent growth into a threat to every business sector that it enters, and so on. And thus it’s deeply encouraging to see that Schmidt, who wields so much power over today’s social and business environment, possesses not just a high IQ and business smarts (he obviously didn’t attain the position of Google CEO by being a dummy) but a reflective sensibility for deeply human concerns to boot.

I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.
 And I worry that we’re losing that

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Sleep Paralysis: The ultimate horror

I’m just going to share these YouTube movie previews with minimal comment, since I have already talked here in the past about my experiences with sleep paralysis.

If you’ve never experienced it, be advised that sleep paralysis really is as thoroughly and deeply shattering as the people in these videos make it out to be. I am, however, beginning to suspect that the level of intensity may vary more dramatically from person to person than I previously thought. I know some people who have experienced it and, although they found it to be quite unpleasant while it was happening, simply brushed it off later. Perhaps they didn’t experience, or didn’t remember, the typical hypnagogic visions, and simply knew it as an experience of half-waking paralysis. Whatever the reason, for them it was nothing more than a pesky disruption in their sleep habits whose effects extended no further than the night of the episode itself, whereas for me it was — and still is, whenever it recurs — a thoroughly devastating experience whose influence leaks into the overall tenor of my waking hours and general worldview. Again, watch the videos.

(Note, by the way, that I regard The Fourth Kind as flawed but enthralling nonetheless. And the horror portrayed by the actors is entirely true to life.)

Our task: Envisioning and creating a new relationship with money

The following comes from a truly wonderful Jan. 25 essay by Charles Leadbeater at New Statesman titled “The best things in life are free.” No comment necessary, other than to express gratitude for such a lucid and moving exposition of a truth so crucial it hurts (and one that’s just as true for the U.S. as it is for Britain, whose situation is Leadbeater’s primary focus; when he talks about Thatcher’s promotion of a “money unbound” economic philosophy beginning in the 1980s, which led to apocalypse-level consumerism and a culture of ultra-debt-based recklessness, he may as well be talking about “Reaganomics”).

If 2009 was spent rescuing the financial system, the year ahead should be spent remaking it, and to do that we need to fashion a fundamentally different relationship with money.

The main lesson of the crisis this past year is that money has become a capricious and overbearing ruler of our lives — by turns threatening to discipline us, only to offer us liberation, on its own terms. Instead of hoping for a return to easy credit and rising property prices, we should put money in its proper place by reducing its footprint in society, limiting its reach, promoting alternative ways to account for what we value and finding less socially destructive ways to save and invest, lend and borrow. We need to see money less as a mystical religion or a drug and more as a tool.

….Thatcherism started life as monetarism, a critique of how Keynesianism had allowed government to become financially incontinent. Thatcher’s original crusade was to restore respect for the value of money through strict control of the money supply. This discipline did not last for long, however. From the mid-1980s, with monetarism cast aside, Thatcherism’s mission was to let money loose. Money was no longer a source of discipline, but an elixir, a source of liberation, freeing people to make their choices in the commercial democracy of the open market. Easier credit allowed a culture of debt and desire to overtake deferred gratification and modest self-sufficiency.

….As the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor puts it in A Secular Age, his history of how religious belief adapts to the society around it, “The individual pursuit of happiness as defined by consumer culture still absorbs much of our time and energy, or else the threat of being shut out of this pursuit through poverty, unemployment, incapacity galvanises our efforts . . . and yet the sense that there is something more presses in. Great numbers of people feel it: in moments of reflection about their life; in moments of relaxation in nature; in moments of bereavement and loss; and quite wildly and unpredictably.”

….When money serves a “something more”, then consumption has a point. When the link is broken, modern, money-driven society loses its anchor. The challenge for politics ought to be to turn that insight into policy and politics by putting money in a more subordinate position in society.

Awesome new reader-friendly and Kindle-friendly web tool: Instapaper

A couple of days ago I stumbled onto Instapaper, a really (really, really) cool web tool that enables a person to instantly save web articles for future reading. This does away with my former method of leaving a ridiculous number of Firefox tabs open and minimized every time I end a computer session. What’s more, Instapaper also features an excellent feature for all of us Kindle users.

The basic tool simply requires you to set up a free account and drag a button labeled “Read Later” to your Firefox Bookmarks toolbar. After that, whenever you come across an article on the web that you want to save for later reading, you simply click the Read Later button, and the article is saved as a link — and also, as a bonus, in a semi-cleaned up, text-based form — at your Instapaper user page. It’s bit like Delicious, only built specifically for use as a reading aid. Later you can return to your Instapaper page and just click to read your saved items.

The Kindle usability comes in two forms: Kindle automatic wireless delivery and the instant production of Kindle-friendly files. For the former, you can set up a situation where your saved items are automatically delivered to your Kindle via its wireless connection at specified intervals. For the latter — which is the one I prefer, since I never pay the $.15 per file that Kindle charges for wireless delivery of user-sent files — Instapaper features a Kindle button on its main page. If you click it, a Kindle-format file of your currently lined-up articles will be generated and downloaded to your computer, complete with a Kindle-clickable table of contents located at the head of it.

I can’t emphasize how delightfully useful this is. Ever since I acquired my Kindle DX last August, fully 90 percent of my use of it has taken the form of saving and converting articles, columns, essays, and stories from the Web (see my recently posted 2009 reading list for the hard evidence). The Kindle friendliness of Instapaper means I’ll be using it all the time, not just as a way to save things to read later but as a way to generate Kindle-formatted docs instantly and with ease.

Gloom Is Good: The Rise of the New Pessimists

“Greed is good,” Gordon Gekko told us in 1987 (echoing and perhaps parodying Ayn Rand’s long-running, uber-egoistic economic cant). For all we know, he may be gearing up to deliver us a repackaged version of the same message later this year when Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps hits theaters. But regardless of what Gekko’s message in that forthcoming sequel may turn out to be, there’s another message that is gearing up for a major groundswell right now, and its orientation is not in question. It can be phrased as a modification of Gekko’s famous maxim: Gloom is good.

I say this based on just two pieces of evidence, but both of them fascinate me — especially since they hail from diametrically opposite ends of the socio-political ideological continuum — and I have a gut feeling that they will soon be joined by more items pointing in a similar direction.

The first is John Derbyshire’s We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. I became alerted to Derbyshire’s existence and writings last September when he mentioned H.P. Lovecraft, whose appearances in public discourse I am always assiduously following, and who, as it turns out, Derbyshire has rightly regarded for some years as a fellow conservative and fellow pessimist who held a cheerfully grim view of the human prospect. Such an attitude and temperament is entirely congenial to Derbyshire’s own, and thus there’s no surprise in the publication of the man’s new book, which is dedicated to the proposition that “the conservative movement has been derailed, by legions of fools and poseurs wearing smiley-face masks.” He argues that “conservatism has been fatally weakened by yielding to infantile temptations: temptations to optimism, to wishful thinking, to happy talk, to cheerily preposterous theories about human beings and the human world,” and it can therefore “no longer provide the backbone of cold realism that every organized society needs.” Obviously, the book is diametrically opposed to the tenor of the interminable Obama campaign — a fact that’s brought home by Derbyshire’s use of exclamations such as “No, we can’t!” and charming terminological reversals such as “The audacity of hopelessness.”

I bought the Kindle edition a few days ago and am positively reveling in the man’s incisive humor and sharp thinking. The book is both laugh-out-loud funny and quite thought-provoking with its heavily researched and serious call to abandon vapid optimism and embrace a serious realism in the form of a fundamental pessimism about human affairs.

Here’s a current favorite passage from chapter three, which is winningly titled “Politics: Show Business for Ugly People.” The topic is the quantifiable devolution of presidential rhetoric toward triviality and idiocy in recent decades:

William Henry Harrison, in his fatal inaugural address, likened liberty to “the sovereign balm for every injury which our institutions may receive.” George H. W. Bush, in his inaugural address, likened it to a kite. “Freedom is like a beautiful kite that can go higher and higher with the breeze,” he proclaimed. We may be only a president or two away from hearing liberty compared to a chocolate fudge sundae.

Second, there’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, written by one of the most visible champions of progressive social and economic thought in recent years, Barbara Ehrenreich. According to the official description, the book “exposes the downside of America’s penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out ‘negative’ thoughts. On a national level, it’s brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster.”

I was alerted to its existence by Kerry Howley’s thoughtful review at Reason.com, titled “It Takes a Village Atheist: Barbara Ehrenreich’s jeremiad against cheerful thinking.” Howley summarizes how Ehrenreich was inspired to write the book when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and subsequently found herself ensnared in a Kafka-esque world of enforced optimism among her doctors and fellow cancer sufferers, who rejected any budding expressions of unhappiness or negativity out of hand and tended to condemn and exclude those who persisted in such folly. Ehrenreich traces this attitude through American evangelicalism and economic thought, focusing on the obvious effects of such “irrational exuberance” (I don’t know if she uses that term itself) in, for instance, the financial markets.

And I, to highlight the obvious point, find the near simultaneous arrival of these two books — We Are Doomed hit bookstores in September 2009, Bright-Sided in October — to be more than a little noteworthy. Here’s hoping we’ll see a healthy slew of such writings throughout the new year. (Actually, for all I know this may already be occurring; I didn’t check before composing this post.) For the past couple of years the propaganda about an economic “recovery” has been polluting public discourse, mostly courtesy of mainstream financial and economic voices and, of course, government leaders at both the federal and state levels. The word “recovery” implies the re-attainment of a former state of healthfulness. The United States has been anything but healthy, economically speaking and in all sorts of other ways, for a very long time now. President Obama, as James Howard Kunstler pointed out in his recent forecast for 2010,

speaks incessantly and implausibly of ‘the recovery’ when all the economic vital signs tell a different story except for some obviously manipulated stock market indexes. You hear this enough times and you can’t help but regard it as lying, and even if it is lying ostensibly for the good of the nation, it is still lying about what is actually going on and does much harm to the project of building a coherent consensus. I submit that we would benefit more if we acknowledged what is really happening to us because only that will allow us to respond intelligently. What prior state does Mr. Obama suppose we’re recovering to?  A Potemkin housing boom and an endless credit card spending orgy?

It’s time for a new realism. Gloom is good, especially amid current circumstances. The fact that this recognition is erupting on both the right and the left bodes well.

The Daemonyx album: 13 tracks of daimonic darkness, finished at last

Immediately when I launched this blog in 2006, I began sharing news about the album of original instrumental music that I was then creating. It’s been a long trek, but the project is finally finished.

Click to buy at CDBaby

Here is the final track listing:

1. The Gates of Deep Darkness
2. Daimonica
3. The Face of the Deep (1)
4. Blood and Milk, movement 1
5. Blood and Milk, movement 2
6. Blood and Milk, movement 3
7. Blood and Milk, movement 4
8. The Dreamlands
9. The Streets of Vastarien
10. Road to Olduvai
11. Dystopian Dreams
12. My Own Death Poems
13. The Face of the Deep (2)

As those of you who have been following this saga already know, the music is akin to a dark soundtrack, with New Age, electronica, rock, metal, chamber, and orchestral flourishes abounding. You’ll also recall that I received very good word about the music early on from some of my horror author peers, including Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Brian Hodge, Tim Lebbon, and Mark Samuels.

Yes, track 8 is a musical exploration of the “Dreamlands” setting created by Lovecraft in such stories as The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, “Polaris,” and “The Other Gods.”

Yes, tracks 9 and 12 were inspired by the works of Ligotti.

The album also crosses paths — particularly in tracks 1, 2, 3, and 13 — with my work as a horror author, especially with some of the material in Dark Awakenings, due out this month.

You can listen to samples and purchase the album, either as a disc or as digital downloads, at CDBaby.

And yes, those of you who won those trivia contests that I held here can now expect to receive your copy of the album — provided you contact me with your postal address!

What I read in 2009

In 2009 I accomplished something in my life as a reader that I had never before accomplished: I kept a list — I’m talking about a full list — of everything I read. Not just books, but short fiction, poetry, and — in the most gargantuan category of all — articles, essays, and reviews. I figured it would prove a helpful exercise in self-reflection for me to have available at a glance the full scope of my reading activities for a given calendar year.

Of course, there are omissions. Specifically, I chose to leave out several hundred, or it may have been several thousand, articles and reports that I read in the course of my pro blogging pursuits. I just didn’t feel led to note down all of those items related to health reform, home healthcare, industrial HVAC, green building, etc., that I was obliged to research for my clients. The reading list below consists of things I read by choice, not out of necessity.

In an interesting development, by the time June arrived I found that I was approaching all of my reading with the thought of the list hanging in the back of my head. At times I even found myself involuntarily judging whether or not to read something by whether or not I thought it would look good on the list. Fortunately, I managed to recognize and squash that idiocy fairly quickly.

Note that I’m embarrassed at the ridiculous stuntedness of the poetry section and the complete absence of a drama section. Also note that I read far more short fiction that what appears in the section labeled as such, since eight of the books that I read in full or in part were short fiction collections.

Finally, I’ll point out that for my own future reference, I frequently included bracketed snippets of what each piece was about in the listing of essays and articles etc., since many of the titles didn’t do the trick on their own.

I sometimes enjoy reading other people’s end-of-the-year reading lists. I hope you’ll enjoy this one. I probably won’t do it again in 2010, or at least not in such detail. Too much work.

My 2009 reading list

BOOKS read in full:

• Brian Evenson, Last Days (1998)
• Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld (2004; 1993)
• Nick Mamatas, Move Underground (2004)
• —, You Might Sleep (2009)
• Mark Samuels, Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes (2008)
• Michael Shea, I, Said the Fly, in The Sixth Omni Book of Science Fiction (1989)
• Douglas Smith, Impossibilia (2008)
• Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
• Simon Strantzas, Beneath the Surface (2008)
• Donald N. Wood, Post-Intellectualism and the Decline of Democracy: The Failure of Reason and Responsibility (1996)

BOOKS read in significant excerpts:

• Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (2007)
• Timothy K. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (2002)
• Douglas E. Cowan, Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen (2008)
• Donald F. Glut, The Dracula Book (1975)
• Anthony Masters, The Natural History of the Vampire (1972)
• Raymond T. McNally, ed.,  A Clutch of Vampires (1974)
• Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires (1994, revised edition)
• Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (1965 [1952])
• James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (1985)
• —, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (1981)
• T.M. Wright, Bone Soup (2009)

Interview: The spirituality of George Romero’s zombie movies

I’ve just been interviewed by TheoFantastique, the excellent website devoted to examining the religious resonances of fantasy, horror, and science fiction.

In “Spirituality in Romero’s Living Dead Films” (Dec. 3), TheoFantastique’s proprietor, John Morehead, quizzes me about my academic paper “Loathsome Objects: George Romero’s Living Dead Films as Contemplative Tools,” which appears in my forthcoming fiction-and-nonfiction collection Dark Awakenings.

On a related note, the publisher recently (and at my request) moved the book’s publication date back from the end of this month to the beginning of January. Hardly a blip on the scheduling radar of all the readers who keep asking me how much longer they’ll have to wait, but a significant shift in terms of the book’s overall momentum.

Story accepted for DARK FAITH anthology (due May 2010)

I’ve received word that my short story “Chimeras & Grotesqueries” has been accepted for publication in Dark Faith, an anthology edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon, to be published by Apex Books in May 2010.

The antho grew out of Maurice’s now-annual Mo*Con literary convention in Indianapolis, which for the past four years has explored the various shadings of the relationship between religion, spirituality, and pop culture, especially as these all relate to darkness and horror. My long-time readers will recall that I was one of the guests of honor at the 2008 con. So, yes, I was formally invited to submit to Dark Faith, but no spaces were guaranteed, and I’m pleased to have made the cut.

The table of contents is quite impressive.

My own contribution to the festivities is a semi-surrealistic tale of the breakdown of reality in an unnamed city as a monstrous metaphysical force invades from without, as seen and told by a faceless street dweller who spends his days living in an alley and making miniature monsters out of garbage. The story is framed by a fictional preface that adds another layer of meaning by hinting at the possibly divine or demonic nature of the author.

It is, in fact, the long-in-coming completion of the story from which I posted an excerpt here all of three years ago, on Halloween day 2006.