Tag Archives | Peter Bebergal

Disinfo Contributor and Author Peter Bebergal on His Brother’s Suicide

By on November 15, 2012 in News 5

Picture: Peter Bebergal (C)

DisinfoCast guest and Disinfo.com contributor Peter Bebergal (Too Much to Dream) wrote an article a few years back about his brother Eric’s suicide and research into the experimental application of the Implicit Association Test in ascertaining suicidal intent. It’s a great read, and with two recent posts about suicide, one that might intrigue our readers.

Here’s an excerpt (mid-article):

What clinicians need is some other measure beyond external evidence that could assess whether someone like Eric is capable of suicide in the near future. Four years after my brother’s death, Harvard researchers at MGH are experimenting with a test they think could help clinicians determine just that. It focuses on a patient’s subconscious thoughts, and if it can be perfected, these researchers say it could give hospitals more of a legal basis for admitting suicidal patients.

Of course, I can’t help thinking about whether such a test could have saved my brother.

… Read the rest

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Uncanny Interviews: A Conversation with (the late) Arthur Machen

By on October 25, 2012 in News 10

English: The House of Souls by Arthur Machen (London: Grant Richards, 1906), with cover designs by Sidney Sime (1867–1941)

The Welsh writer Arthur Machen, whom I recently channeled for Weird Fiction Review, has been receiving some renewed interest these days.

Last year Penguin Classics reprinted a number of his proto-weird tales in The White People and Other Weird Stories. Weird fiction is becoming more popular, mostly due to the efforts of people like Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and many readers unfamiliar with this genre are rediscovering the early influences, Machen being one of the finest examples. This month, in the Evangelical Christian magazine Christianity Today, the writer Jonathan Ryan made a distinction between the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the sacred terror of Machen. Matt Cardin over at The Teeming Brain takes issue with this:

Cosmic horror and sacred terror don’t have to be set up as opposites.

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Arik Roper Q&A

By on August 6, 2012 in News 0

I interviewed the artist Arik Roper for the 2011 book Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood (Soft Skull Press). The wonderful HiLobrow.com, curated and edited by Joshua Glenn, recently ran the entire transcript of my chat with Roper:

Illustration and visionary art have long been kindred spirits. Many artists belonging to the Symbolists and Decadents (art movements heavy with occult and esoteric flavor) started off as illustrators or graphic designers and many continued to incorporate these techniques into their work. This tradition continued into the twentieth century with artists such as Ernst Fuchs, H.R. Giger, and — more recently — Mark Ryden and Amanda Sage. In the Sixties, this commingling of visionary states and illustration crossed over into pop culture by way of comic books and album covers. Some of Jack Kirby’s cosmic landscapes and other-worldly machinery are as mind-altering as any Symbolist painting, and the ethereal floating islands on a Roger Dean album cover convey a similar sensibility.

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