TLO Member Interview: Matt Cardin

INTRODUCTION

Hello, folks. Tonight's installation of the series is with the titanically-talented Matt Cardin. I've known Matt through TLO almost since the beginning of this incarnation of the site, and can truly say I hold him in the highest esteem. Not only is he an incredible writer, he is intelligent to a fault, a true gentleman...I could drag the list on, but such a fellow as Matt truly doesn't need it. I might add that he & I share the enjoyment of cheesy fantasy flicks such as Hawk The Slayer, and Godzilla movies! If a Godzilla-fest can't keep one grounded, well, I just don;t know what in this world can. And now, Mr. Cardin:

1. Obviously, you are an admirer of Thomas Ligotti's works. So, how did you first come across his writing?

I've told this story a time or two, so I'll "add value" to it this time around by giving the Very Detailed Version.

A few years after graduating from college, I stumbled across a paperback copy of Grimscribe on a Wal-Mart book rack and was immediately interested to see that one of the blurbs drew a comparison between this Thomas Ligotti guy and H.P. Lovecraft. I had been a Lovecraft lover since high school and had cultivated myself as something of an amateur Lovecraft scholar in college and afterwards by devouring reams of criticism about him and purchasing not only his collected stories but his famous "revisions," marginal writings, selected letters, and so on. A blurbish comparison to Lovecraft was therefore calculated to rivet me.

So was the fact that a quick skim through Grimscribe's contents revealed an enormously evocative gallery of story titles, as well as a dedication "to the memory of H.P. Lovecraft" appended to the first story in the book, "The Last Feast of Harlequin." The conclusion was clear: I must read this book and this author. But alas, I was already backlogged with books at the time, and both my internal and external lives were in the midst of painful dislocations and disruptions. So I just didn’t have the time and energy to dive into a new author. I put the book back on the shelf with a pang of regret.

A year or two later, I ran into The Nightmare Factory in a Waldenbooks. I recognized the author's name, examined the book, and grew even more excited about this mysterious Ligotti fellow whose fundamental authorial vibe appeared to resonate in almost impossible sympathy with my own most personal, poignant, and profound passions and predispositions. But again, for reasons similar to the ones stated above, I regretfully returned the book to the shelf.

Predictably, these two fleeting encounters, with their hints of a magnificent literary experience awaiting me in the future, imparted a kind of talismanic quality of expectancy to my unformed image of Tom and his writings. I can't say I noticed this consciously, though. It was only something I recognized fully in retrospect.

The third and definitive close encounter occurred another year or two down the road when I was browsing through a new paperback horror anthology titled Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium on a supermarket book rack. It contained a story titled "The Nightmare Network" with Ligotti's name attached. I hadn't thought of him in awhile, and my excitement peaked like an overheated amp meter. I skimmed the story and then arrived at its final lines. They said, "Zoom out to a wide shot of the universe. There is no one behind the camera." That ultra-nihilistic and mind-blowing idea, and the utterly brilliant way of embodying it in prose fiction, corresponded so shockingly and marvelously to my then-current worldview and inner orientation (agonized nihilism and philosophical schizophrenia, seasoned with Supreme Despair, inflamed by acute bibliophilia) that I was instantly in love. But I didn't buy the anthology. Instead, I began laying plans to find those full Ligotti collections that I had previously passed by.

It was around this same time, circa 1996-7, that I first became involved in Internet life and began participating in the alt.horror.cthulhu newsgroup, where I posted several long and excited analyses of Lovecraft's cosmic-horrific fictional/philosophical vision. Shortly after my run-in with "The Nightmare Network," somebody at alt.horror.cthulhu mentioned Thomas Ligotti as an author of interest to HPL fans. I chimed in with news about my excited discovery of that story in Darkside with its intoxicating nihilistic vision. This elicited a response from a man named Jonathan Padgett. We started talking. A lot. First on the newsgroup, then via email. We rapidly became friends. Turned out he was a longtime Ligotti fan, and when he learned of my literary and philosophical tastes and outlook and proclivities, he began urging me to take the Ligottian plunge, and to do it soon. The stars had obviously aligned. Dark and eldritch deities were calling to me from vast depths of cyclopean solitude. I went and bought a copy of Grimscribe through Amazon. About 10 pages into the "The Last Feast of Harlequin," I realized that I truly was in the midst of a life-altering literary encounter.


2. How long have you been a fan of weird fiction? Also, how were you first introduced to this genre?

From earliest childhood I liked stories about traditionally spooky and scary subjects of a Halloweeny sort. For instance, I was enchanted with a children's picture book about a witch titled The Witchy Broom, which I begged my parents and babysitter to read to me repeatedly. At around age 11 or 12 I started reading some horror fiction in earnest, especially the short horror stories of Ray Bradbury, whose "Pillar of Fire" I particularly loved. I also loved Bradbury's entire October Country collection. And I was fairly transported by Something Wicked This Way Comes. I read some Poe as well, and vividly recall being introduced to him by my accidental discovery of one of those fat little "illustrated classics" paperbacks on the bookshelf of my third-grade classroom. Naturally, I also read some stuff by Stephen King and a few of the other popular authors (e.g., Anne Rice) whose names, books, and movie adaptations cropped up everywhere in 1980s American popular culture.

But my true turn toward authentic weird horror fiction didn't occur until my middle teen years with my discovery of Lovecraft. This fortuitous find can be partly credited to the fact that my high school library contained a copy of Wise and Fraser's Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, which included Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Rats in the Walls." Both the stories themselves and the editors' biographical sketch of HPL lit me up like a thousand-watt light bulb. This was augmented by the fact that I was intrigued by a rather mysterious description of Lovecraft that I had read in a description of the Call of Cthulhu game that appeared in a book about role-playing games titled Dicing with Dragons. These combined forces led me to buy a couple of those Ballantine paperback collections of HPL's work. I also found a copy of de Camp's Lovecraft biography in a public library near my hometown. I swallowed the biography whole and began to pick my way through the story collections, and, as has happened with so many previous readers, I found in the personage of Howard Phillips Lovecraft a lifelong object of the most intense feelings of fascination, affection, awe, and spiritual kinship.


3. If you were to choose, which Ligotti story is your absolute favorite, and why?

I have to approach this question by thinking not of which story I like best but of which one seems most quintessentially Ligottian to me, as judged by its vivid encapsulation and evocation of what I perceive to be Tom's archetypal vision and passions. And of course I can't name a single story in this regard. But a few that assert themselves are "Nethescurial," "The Bungalow House," "Dr. Locrian's Asylum," "The Shadow at the Bottom of the World," and "The Tsalal." I also have to name I Have a Special Plan for This World (the poem cycle) and Tom's and Brandon Trenz's screenplay Crampton.


4. Ligotti aside, what are some of your other favorite authors in this genre?

Remaining strictly with weird horror, I'll name Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, T.E.D. Klein, Mark Samuels, Reggie Oliver, and Michael Shea (whose work I have only been recently -- and gloriously -- turned on to). It seems there's a kind of renaissance happening in recent years, with the literary world seeing the emergence of quite a few new authors who display a fine feel for weird horror and a solid knowledge of its genre roots. Interestingly, many of them conspicuously inhabit the Ligottian orbit. I have already named Mark Samuels but I'll stop there, since if I start trying to name other names I'll surely leave out somebody I meant to mention. Beyond all of this, there are some classic weird fiction writers whose work I have enjoyed -- sometimes immensely -- even though I've read comparatively less of it, such as Machen, Le Fanu, and Hodgson.


5. And which stories most influenced you? At a young age (dependent on your answer to question two), and as your tastes changed with age?

As an early adolescent I read a hardcover, oversized horror anthology for young adults whose title escapes me even though I have run across it one or two times in my adulthood at library book sales. I was thoroughly terrified and deeply horrified (there's an important distinction) by some of these stories, one of which involved an adolescent girl living in some sort of backwoodsy rural American locale. She was convinced that a devil or demon was visiting her window at night. Her father, a sullen farmer type with a sourly skeptical personality, grew enraged at these claims. I recall that some sort of cloven-hoof type pattern was etched one night on the girl's window by the supposed visitor. The story's climactic scene described people on the lawn outside the house being attacked at twilight by an invisible presence that manifested as something like a whirlwind of teeth. This freaked me out badly.

Those Poe stories in the illustrated young person's versions were really influential. I still recall the black-and-white pictures in great detail: the "vulture-eyed" old man from "The Telltale Heart," the narrator's initial approach on horseback toward "the melancholy House of Usher," and so on.

I might mention that from around age 10 to 15, I considered myself more of a fantasy fan than a horror fan, even though horror was a big interest. Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, Terry Brooks, Susan Cooper, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle -- that sort of thing. I was really passionate about some of those authors and books. My shift in self-image from "fantasy fan" to "horror fan" occurred with my discovery of, and growing interest in, Lovecraft. And this was bound up with my equally inbuilt and burgeoning fascination with religious, spiritual, and philosophical matters. Lovecraft with his overtly cosmic and philosophical focus and his obsession with dark, eldritch, horrific monstrosities and mysteries was the perfect horror writer to speak directly to my overall tastes and psychological bent. My initiatory reading experience was the Lin Carter-edited The Doom That Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, in its 1980s Ballantine incarnation with the Michael Whelan cover art. This means I was first introduced to Lovecraft via the story "The Other Gods" -- not his best work, but still pretty good, and still evocative of his signature trope of colossal cosmic horrors that shatter the human sense of reality, sanity, and identity. That collection also contained such gems as "Nyarlathotep" and "The Festival." So those stories stand out as major roadmarks in my literary life.


6. As far as horror television shows over the years go, do you have any favorites? Any that had a lasting influence on you?

I was turned onto The Twilight Zone at age 11 or 12 when I watched an episode with my aunt. It was the one about the ventriloquist who fears his dummy is coming to life, until in the end the man and the dummy switch roles. The opening scene where the guy finishes his stage act by comically muffling the dummy's mouth with his hand, only to go backstage and discover teeth marks on his fingers, is etched forever on my brain. So are the semi-hallucinatory scenes where the guy is being hounded by the voice and projected silhouette of his dummy.

Tales from the Darkside disturbed me in similar ways. I'll never forget the episode where a female college student rents an attic apartment and is terrorized and finally killed by a squat reptilian monster with needle teeth that lives in a curiously tiny closet. Watching that thing was like a waking nightmare for me. For months afterward I leaped into my bed from several feet away because I couldn't stop flashing on the image of that tiny, clawed hand swiping for the girl's foot from underneath the bedskirt.

In high school I was turned onto Night Gallery when it showed on, I think, WGN. In college I was turned onto the original Outer Limits and ended up recording multiple episodes on VHS tapes that I kept for years afterwards. I was really a passionate fan of these shows for awhile.

The horror-oriented episodes of Ray Bradbury Theater could be pretty good, especially the one that adapts "Usher II." I taught high school English for six years and showed that episode unfailingly, every year, to multiple classrooms of students at Halloween.

I was a pretty serious X-Files fan, although I didn't watch a single episode for the final couple of seasons.


7. And what about movies?

Again staying with horror, I watched Creepshow on HBO while home alone as a middle teen. The story with the mutant ape in the crate was the most disturbing thing I had ever seen. The cockroach segment got to me as well.

Believe it or not, I was unable to sleep at age nine or 10 after watching a network television broadcast of the cheesefest that is Kingdom of the Spiders, starring William Shatner. That movie bothered me badly, an effect that may have been aided by the fact that I watched it in early adolescence while my parents were out of town and I was staying with my grandparents.

I dig The Exorcist and appreciate what Blatty and Friedkin were trying to do.

Dario Argento's Deep Red, Tenebrae, and -- especially -- Suspiria are fairly glorious. The opening sequence of the latter with its creepy cab ride through a nocturnal forest accompanied by a sublime Goblin soundtrack represents a high point in the history of horror cinema.

I have sometimes named John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness as my favorite horror film. I'm a passionate lover of Romero's Living Dead films. Ringu is pretty cool. The Universal and Hammer horror movies are dear to me. Other major favorites include Lamberto Bava's Demons and Demons II, The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2, Ravenous (wonderful!), Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer, the wondrous phenomenon that is Dead People, a.k.a., Messiah of Evil, Cronenberg's The Fly, the original Wicker Man, the original The Haunting, the original Carnival of Souls, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Videodrome, The Legend of Hell House, Carpenter's The Thing, Re-Animator, Return of the Living Dead, and one or two of Lucio Fulci's films (The Gates of Hell, The Beyond).


8. Okay, departing from this genre, what else do you like to read? Favorite literary
piece from other genres, and why is it so?

Although I do have a fairly firm foundation of general literary knowledge, these days I read comparatively little fiction outside the horror genre. I taught Shakespeare to high schoolers for several years -- Romeo and Juliet once, Julius Caesar several times -- and have always found it valuable and fascinating. I like to read some poetry from time to time: Frost, Swinburne, Wordsworth, Shelley. The Romantics figure pretty highly in this vein because I'm sometimes afflicted with a severe case of sehnsucht and find it most effectively mirrored and evoked by those writers. I've also enjoyed the work of contemporary poet and novelist Stephen Dobyns. For years I was addicted to the novels of Robert Anton Wilson, which have a crossover value with horror. In the 1990s when I was working as Glen Campbell's video director at his theater in Branson, Missouri, a member of his band, a very literate and interesting guy named Ken Skaggs, was always reading lots of serious literature. We had many great conversations about books, philosophy, religion, and life, so when he recommended Dorothy Allison's novel Bastard out of Carolina, which had recently been a finalist for the National Book Award, I took the unlikely (for me) step of actually reading it. The memory of it has always stayed with me as the one example of modern, mainstream literary fiction that I read and enjoyed.

One of my major literary interests is dystopian fiction, so you'll sometimes find me reading things like Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and so on. The very recent book-length debut of American writer Paolo Bacigalupi, a fiction collection titled Pump Six and Other Stories, is a major event and an instant classic in the dystopian genre. Dystopian fiction appeals to me because its purpose is to pinpoint the possible disastrous endpoints of present cultural trajectories, which for me, for some reason, is an inherently enjoyable pastime. I think fictional dystopianism, as it might be called, is a mode that's particularly well suited to the current cultural moment, which is as apocalyptic as any I can think of since the global convulsion of World War II and the swell of revolutionist fomentation and planetary catastrophism in the late 1960s and early 70s.

I was introduced to Bruno Schulz via Tom's well-advertised love of his work, and found The Street of Crocodiles to be utterly enthralling.

The bulk of my non-horror reading is nonfiction. I read lots of books, essays, and articles dealing with religion and spirituality. Some are scholarly, others are more "popular." Major authors and influences include Alan Watts, Douglas Harding, Eckhart Tolle, Huston Smith, E.F. Schumacher, Frederick Franck, Oswald Chambers, Brother David Steindl-Rast, Janwillem van de Wetering, Ken Wilber, Marcus Borg, and various other authors of texts about Zen Buddhism, Christian history, mystical and/or nondual Christianity, nondualism in general, the perennial philosophy, and so on. Ancient Western philosophy is a favorite subject. I return occasionally to Plato and Marcus Aurelius. I have also been addicted for long spans of time to the work of pessimistic, nihilistic, agnostic, existential, and/or skeptical writers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and so on. Basically, anybody who focuses on some facet of the fact of human existence and our agonized self-awareness of it.

At times I have craved and loved the novels and essays of Ayn Rand.

Sometimes I crave aphoristic writing, diaries, and other types of fragmentary writing. Whenever this comes over me, I can be emotionally and intellectually consumed for a time by returning to Henri Amiel's Journal Intime, Schopenhauer's Essays and Aphorisms, or Cioran's The Trouble with Being Born.

Another major area of interest is the issue of peak oil, economic collapse, civilizational destruction, cultural amnesia, and the like. Of course this dovetails agreeably with my interest in dystopian stuff. So you'll find me reading authors like Morris Berman (The Twilight of American Culture, Dark Ages America), Theodore Roszak (Where the Wasteland Ends), John Michael Greer (The Long Descent, his blog The Archdruid Report), James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency, World Made by Hand, his blog Cluster#### Nation), Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society), and Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death, Technopoly).

I also read lots of books about writing and the nature of artistic creativity.


9. And aside from reading, what sort of activities do you enjoy?

Quite honestly, at times I'm fond of just sitting and doing nothing. I also write and compose music. You ask about these creative pursuits below, so I'll save the details for there. For most of my life I've been an avid cinephile, but circumstances in the past several years have forced me to give up a lot of that since I just don't have the time, opportunity, or access to watch the movies I would choose -- or sometimes any movies at all.

Since 2003 I have devoted increasing amounts of time and attention to observing the entropic spiral of the current U.S. economic, social, political, cultural, and spiritual situation. I suppose that might count as a hobby, especially since I sometimes blog about it.


10. Do you have a personal philosophy, an outlook on life, as it were?

For a very long time, I was afflicted with the "philosophical schizophrenia" I mentioned above. I would cycle rapidly, sometimes over a period of weeks, sometimes over months, through various belief systems and worldviews. First one worldview -- evangelical Protestantism, for instance -- and then another -- scientific materialism or value nihilism or Eastern monism -- would seem true. I could actually watch and feel myself shift into the transitional mental/emotional state where the axioms underlying my current worldview began to sputter and die while those of an alternate one began to glow with life. The present viewpoint would be dislodged and the new one would rapidly settle into me and over me. Each shift was accompanied by a sense of exhilaration. This may have been as much an aesthetic phenomenon as anything else. I may have been unconsciously trying to find and fit myself to a belief system that would satisfy my craving for objective intellectual truth combined with emotional beauty.

Whatever the case or cause, the phenomenon eventually burned itself out and left me pretty much incapable of adopting any kind of belief system at all. I can't regard belief systems as anything but arbitrary bundles of substance-less propositions residing nowhere but in the minds of the persons who hold them. A side effect is that I'm hyper aware of the way the overwhelming majority of people muddle through their daily lives in the hypnotic sway of beliefs they don't really own or understand. Whenever anyone asserts a philosophical or religious or value-based truth claim, I instantly and involuntarily zero in on the underlying axioms and assumptions being silently posited, and recognize the baseless and unexamined nature of both them and the surface beliefs they support. Sometimes I keep these thoughts to myself. Other times I air them. Taking the latter tack, as I've learned, is usually regrettable. As Bertolt Brecht insightfully observed about the quality of honesty -- specifically, the type that led Socrates to help his fellow ancient Athenians recognize the flimsiness of their collective cultural certainties -- "How fortunate the man with none."

As for my own current outlook, it's pretty much in line with what's commonly called nondualism. So far as a personal philosophy or spirituality goes, I'm chiefly interested in investigating (directly, subjectively, in first-person mode) what I am and what's the relationship between this subjective "I" and the objective world.


11. Would you describe yourself as a believer in the possibility of the supernatural, or a skeptic?

I'm confident that events sometimes happen, and forces and entities do exist, that fulfill the customary definition of "supernatural." But in absolute terms there's no such thing as a "supernature," since whatever might be dubbed such is just another part of the totality that is The Real. My understanding of these things is shaped and expressed pretty well by expositors of the so-called perennial philosophy, especially by religious scholar Huston Smith, to whose works I'll refer without much comment.

Having said that, I'll add that I'm always the first person in the room whose lip curls with disgust whenever somebody claims to have encountered a ghost, experienced a psychic moment, seen an angel, or -- Azathoth spare us -- "magnetized" or "attracted" some sort of good fortune into his or her life via some sort of recycled New Thought-type garbage a la Rhonda Byrne's detestable best-seller The Secret. (That didn't keep me, though, from adoring Richard Bach's Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, when I read it in high school and encountered substantially the same idea.) Virtually 100 out of 100 claims of "supernatural" events result from delusion, wishful thinking, ego inflation, intentional huckstering, or a combination of all four. Whatever's left that's truly paranormal after all the bull#### is exposed has something to do with what British writer Patrick Harpur has called "daimonic reality" (in his very interesting book by that title) and what American writer John Keel came up against in his famous encounters with the Mothman. I find speculations and investigations about this kind of thing to be deeply fascinating and exhilarating. In fact, when I was a kid I ingested a library's worth of young adult books about psychic phenomena, strange powers, cryptozoology, ghosts, hauntings, demons, monsters, UFOs, aliens, and mythical lands. Today that type of thing represents more of a vestigial interest than a living passion.


12. What is your Great Fear? Your greatest wish or inspiration?

Great Fear? Probably to be exposed as a fraud -- at my job, with my family, in my personal life, in my supposedly "deep" philosophical understandings. For me this would represent absolute failure -- a term that, for me, is just another way of saying the same thing. This may be one of the several reasons that I find Tom's stories to be so meaningful and horrifying: because they invokes that fascination with the idea of depth and then work it into narratives that expose the empty, flimsy, fraudulent nature of everything, including the human self with all its pretensions.

Another great fear: extreme physical agony.

Another great fear: to be trapped forever in the state of awful anhedonia that has gripped me at times in an icy cocoon for extended periods of suffering.

Greatest wish: to somehow enter into a life situation that's tailor-made to elicit from me the energy and activity that will fulfill my "purpose" in having been born at all with this idiosyncratic package of predispositions and external life circumstances.

Greatest inspiration: finding that my attempts to express deep and private thoughts, feelings, moods, emotions, and insights in words, music, or some other tangible, communicable form are greeted with expressions of understanding, enthusiasm, and even identification by other people.


13. We all know you are an accomplished author. How did you begin writing? Was it easy for you, or did you encounter pitfalls along that road?

My desire to write seems to be innate. I remember several incidents where I was too young to write, maybe two or three years old, and used a pen to scribble loops and lines on sheets of paper in an attempt to pretend I was writing. I always did well on all of my written schoolwork. I attended a couple of "young authors" conferences in elementary school. In high school I entered a vampire story in a local writing contest and ended up winning first prize.

It was my entry into a hellish mental-emotional state for several years after college that led me to start writing fiction again after a hiatus. It also led me to keep a journal with obsessive care. Today I have a deep stack of spiral-bound notebooks, part journal and part commonplace book, that chronicles my developing ability to express to myself, with as close an approximation of absolute clarity as I could achieve, my deepest thoughts, reflections, feelings, insights, and intuitions about pretty much everything. A number of people have told me in recent years that I convey thoughts and ideas with especial clarity in written prose, particularly of the expository sort. If that's true, then I credit it to my compulsive dedication of about 12 years of my life to those notebooks.

As for pitfalls, the small number of stories that I have had published from 1998 to the present represents an outpouring of fiction that occurred largely of its own accord during a very short span of years, mainly 1998 to 2001. As I have discovered with increasing clarity over time, my vitality and creativity wax and wane. I fall into involuntary periods of almost complete creative hibernation, during which I simply "get by" at work and home. Nothing, no energy or motivation or sense of enjoyment, is left for anything else. My fiction writing self has been caught in just such a coma for several years now, while my nonfiction activities have been more lively (although they, too, have gone underground from time to time).


14. Writers aside, any other heroes/idols, so to speak, be they fictional (Randolph Carter, for instance) or actual?

Not really. I admire the hell out of a lot of filmmakers, musicians, and religious/spiritual/philosophical geniuses. But I have no real heroes as such, if a hero is defined as somebody who serves as a primary role model and source of inspiration.


15. Do you have any interesting folks hiding in your family tree? If so, what did they do, what are they known for?

My maternal grandfather, who just turned 91 years old, was a navigator on a U.S. bomber plane during World War II. He was on the team who first test drove a newfangled invention called radar. I think I have James K. Polk, eleventh President of the United States (1845-9), as a distant ancestor.


16. You are in Texas now. Any chance that living there may influence future fiction? The atmosphere of that state seems to work wonders for Lansdale and did for Bob Howard, as well. Your thoughts?

I have indeed seen relocation to a new environment spark some inspiration in the past, as when my move to Mansfield, Missouri (a tiny rural town that's famous for being the adult home and current burial place of Laura Ingalls Wilder) was followed by a brief outburst of story writing in 2001. Within four months of moving there I had written, among other things, The God of Foulness, in which Mitch's house out in the country is directly modeled on a creaking old house that came into the possession of my in-laws and evoked lots of interesting emotions in me. Whether Texas will reawaken my comatose muse of fiction remains to be seen.


17. In addition to being an astounding author, you are also a musician. Tell us a bit about that aspect of your talent.

I began taking piano lessons at the age of eight, and it rapidly became apparent that I had a natural talent for the instrument. I have long fingers, a high degree of natural dexterity, and an innate musical sense, so the piano was a great fit. During my teen years I studied classical music in earnest under a really accomplished teacher, a man named John Archer in Monett, Missouri. Under his tutelage I once performed as the featured soloist on a Haydn Concerto in D with the Ozarks Festival Orchestra.

In high school I discovered the existence of music synthesizers and multitrack recorders. I acquired some gear and took it to college, where I studied video production and composed original scores to accompany my projects. Soon after I graduated, this activity went into hibernation, although I continued playing the piano at various Protestant churches, which I had started doing back in high school. A few years ago I worked for nine months at a piano and keyboard store and discovered that the newest generation of digital instruments could enable me to produce the music I had always heard in my head, which is inspired along the same lines as the things that draw me to weird horror fiction, dystopian literature, and philosophical and religious issues. I acquired a Yamaha music workstation and a 16-track digital hard-disc mixer/recorder, and ended up producing an album's worth of instrumental music over a three-year span. Currently the album is finished and just needs mastering, which was scheduled for completion at a professional music studio in Missouri before the move to Texas blew those plans out of the water. I'm in a holding pattern right now. Anybody who wants to hear samples of the music can do so at the MySpace page for my personal musical project, which I have dubbed, on the sage advice of visual artist extraordinaire Jason Van Hollander, Daemonyx. It mostly sounds like a dark movie soundtrack composed in various musical forms and genres (rock, metal, orchestral, chamber, electronica, ambient).

Currently, as I write these words, I have been living without access to any sort of keyboard instrument for eight weeks. That's the longest I've gone in my adult life without making music. I'm feeling strangely stifled and antsy.


18. Musically speaking, what are your tastes? A few of your favorite performers? (and you aren't allowed to say yourself!)

Blue Oyster Cult. Current 93. Dead Can Dance. Rob Zombie. Jill Tracy. Metallica. J.S. Bach. Vivaldi. Vangelis. Mannheim Steamroller. Sigur Ros. King Crimson. Some others who are escaping me right now.

I'm a lifelong fan of film music by all sorts of composers and groups: Hans Zimmer, Basil Poledouris, John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Philip Glass, Bernard Hermann, Goblin, Tan Dun, Elliot Goldenthal, Shigeru Umebayashi, and many more.

Oddly, even though I have no liking for country or mainstream pop music as such, I have a soft spot for the music of Glen Campbell after having worked for the man for three years in the 90s. His classic songs -- "Gentle on My Mind," "Wichita Lineman," and all that -- are really affecting pieces of music. I also have a soft spot for John Denver. Seriously.


19. Do you have a vivid recall of your dreams? Are your dreams astounding, or pedestrian?

For some reason my dream life has died down in the past couple of years, but in the past I have been blessed or cursed with astoundingly vivid dreams that have fallen into various recognizable thematic categories.

One category involves horrific experiences of sleep paralysis with the typical accompaniment of hypnagogic visions. I have written about this at length in a post to my blog, The Teeming Brain, so I'll hold off on talking about it here.

Another category involves dreams of storms. From time to time I'll dream of epic and apocalyptic skyscapes hovering over huddled towns. These skyscapes drop one or more ropy tornado funnels that rip through the towns and, in the typical odd fashion of dream reality, fill me with a simultaneous sense of utter terror and ecstatic exhilaration. In the most purely mind-blowing of these dreams, my oneiric vantage point was suddenly and breathtakingly raised to a level above the clouds, where I witnessed a squadron of glowing spheres, colored all sizzling in eye-searing reds and blacks, that hid in the clouds and perpetrated the storms below. Interestingly, this dream was followed by a period of extreme literary creativity in my waking life.

Another category of dreams involves the recurrence of a spider figure. While the dream is in progress, I don't remember that I have ever had such a dream before, but in point of fact this spider has visited me several times in several different guises. Once it was oversized and comically bizarre, like a Lego version of a spider. Other times it has been tiny and black. In almost all of these dreams, it crops up in mundane places -- once crawling out of a closet, once buried in a box of sand -- and surprises me, as when I dug into the box of sand and felt a sharp, stinging pain. When I lifted my hand to examine it, I found a small black spider still attached and still biting me. That's common, too: the spider tends to bite me. As with the storm dream about the floating spheroids, whenever I have these spider dreams I tend to experience a period of enhanced creativity for a few weeks afterwards in my waking life. Two weeks ago I had the first such dream in a long time.

One of my favorite dreams, which I like to recall because it's so full of overtly "deep"-sounding symbolism, occurred about a year ago and involved an epic plague of bats racing down an asphalt road. I witnessed this from an aerial vantage point that showed me the road winding through a nighttime pastoral landscape glazed with silver moonlight. I could see that the road ended at a hillside, at a tunnel entrance, where large work lights glowed in the gloom. My viewpoint swooped downward to show me a crew of human workers manning the lights. The bat swarm reached the tunnel entrance and shot through it like a bullet train. An imprudent worker got caught in the maelstrom and screamed as he was pummeled to death. After the last bat had gone underground, the workers swiftly sealed the tunnel entrance. My viewpoint approached the door, which I now saw was fashioned from ancient wood and emblazoned with archetypal symbols from myriad world religious traditions. Somehow I opened the door, or else peered right through the wood, and saw thousands of human-sized bats hanging upside down from the ceiling in an uneasy sleep, in endless rows that extended deep into the far reaches of the tunnel.


20. Anything you would like to add, perhaps something I didn't think to ask that you feel I should have?

I've been mostly AWOL from TLO for the better part or two or three years now, making only occasional and sometimes anonymous drop-ins that are separated by blocks of many months. This has been bound up with that recurrent cycle of inner silence that I mentioned earlier. I've seen how vital and active TLO has grown, and have simply not had the energy or will to participate. This has saddened me, especially since I participated so vigorously in the site for so many years and then fell out right at the moment when it was entering a new and fruitful phase of its existence. It's kind of amazing to step back in at this point and see how many new and interesting people have become central to the site's life. This interview project is serving to introduce me to many of them for the first time. Thank you for that, Jimmy.